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THE LIBRARY OF 


REVEREND Harry M. NORTH 


GRADUATE OF THE CLASS OF 1899 
TRUSTEE 1919-1932 







DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
DURHAM, N. C. 





DUKE 
UNIVERSITY 


DIVINITY SCHOOL 
LIBRARY 








MESSAGES FROM THE EPISTLE 
TO THE HEBREWS 





MESSAGES FROM 
THE EPISTLE TO 


THE HEBREWS 


By HANDLEY C. G. MOULE, D.D. 


BISHOP OF DURHAM 


HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
NEW YORK 


1909 





PREFACE 


HE following chapters are the work of 
intervals of leisure scattered over a long 
time. The exposition had advanced some way 
when an unexpected call to new and exacting 
duties compelled me to put it aside for several 
years. Accordingly a certain difference of treat- 
ment in the later chapters as compared with 
the earlier will probably be seen by the 
reader, particularly a rather fuller detail in the 
exposition. But purpose and plan are essen- 
tially the same throughout. 

No attempt whatever is made, here or in the 
course of the work, to deal with those literary 
and historical problems which so conspicuously 
attach themselves to this Epistle. Who the 
“Hebrews ” were is nowhere discussed. Nor is 
any positive answer offered to a question to 
which assuredly no such answer can be given, 
the question, namely, of the authorship. In 
my opinion, in face of all that I have read 
to the contrary, it still seems at least possible 


Vv 


250859 


vi PREFACE 


that the wlttmate human author was St. Paul. 
All, or very nearly all, the objections to his 


name which the phenomena of the Epistle ~ 


prima face present, and some of which lie 
unquestionably deep, seem to be capable of 
a provisional answer if we assume, what is 
so conceivable, that the Apostle committed 
his message and its argument, on purpose, 
to a colleague so gifted, mentally and by 
the Spirit, that he might be trusted to 
cast the work into his own style. The well- 
known remark of Origen that only God knows 
who “wrote” the Epistle appears to me to 
point (if we look at its context) this way. 
Origen surely means by the “writer” what 
is meant in Rom. xvi. 22. Only, on the 
hypothesis, the amanuensis of our Epistle was, 
for a special purpose presumably, a Christian 
prophet in his own right. 

In any case the author, if not an apostle, 
was a prophet. And he carries to us a prophet’s 
“burthen ” of unspeakable import, and in words 
to which all through the Christian ages the soul 
has responded as to the words of the Holy Spirit. 


HANDLEY DUNELM. 
Easter, 1909. 


CONTENTS 


I 
PAGE 
ConsIpDER Him G : : k i 1 
Heb. i,-ii, 
II 
A Heart or Fait . é 3 : ‘ 8 
Heb. iii, 
Ill 
Unto PERFECTION . 4 : : ar et 
Heb. iv.-vi. 
IV 
Our GREAT MELCHIZEDEK . : : BORE: 
Heb. vii. 
V 
Tue Betrrer Covenant , 2 Y Ey atebes 
Heb. viii. 
VI 
SANCTUARY AND SACRIFICE . ‘ E ~ 32 
Heb. ix. 


250859 


Viii CONTENTS 


VII 
PAGE 
Fou, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT . - . Me 
Heb. x. 
VIII 
FaAItH AND ITs PowER ‘ ; A 6 (Gi 
Heb. xi. (I.). 
: IX 
FaItH AND ITs ANNALS 3 ae 
Heb. xi. (II.). 
x 
FOLLOWERS OF THEM : ‘ E : ee 
Heb. xii. 1-14. 
XI 
SINAI AND SION p , : 5 . 0 
Heb, xii. 14-28. 
XII 
APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS : : . 100 
Heb, xiii. 1-14. ; 
XIII 
Last WorRDs . : ; R 2 . 110 


Heb. xiii. 15-25. 


MESSAGES 


FROM THE 


EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 


CHAPTER I 


CONSIDER HIM 
Hes. i.-ii. 


ET us open the Epistle to the Hebrews, with 
an aim simple and altogether practical for 
heart and for life. Let us take it just as it 
stands, and somewhat as a whole. We will not 
discuss its authorship, interesting and extensive 
as that problem is. We will not attempt, 
within the compass of a few short chapters, 
to expound continuously its wonderful text. 
Rather, we will gather up from it some of its 
large and conspicuous spiritual messages, taken 
as messages of the Word of God “ which liveth 
and abideth for ever.” 
No part of Holy Scripture is ever really out 
I 


2 CONSIDER HIM 


of date. But it is true meanwhile that, as for 
persons so for periods, there are Scripture books 
and Scripture truths which are more than 
ordinarily timely. It is not that others are 
therefore untimely, nor that only one class of 
book or one aspect of truth can be eminently 
timely at one time. But it seems evident that 
the foreseeing Architect of the Bible has so 
adjusted the parts of His wonderful vehicle of 
revelation and blessing that special fitnesses 
continually emerge between our varying times 
and seasons on the one hand and the multifold 
Word on the other. 

The Epistle to the Hebrews is in some re- 
markable respects a book timely for our day. It 
invites to itself, if I read it aright, the renewed 
attention of the thoughtful Christian, and not 
least of the thoughtful Christian of the English 
Church, as it brings him messages singularly in 
point to some of the main present needs of his 
spiritual life and its surroundings. It was 
written manifestly in the first instance to meet 
special and pressing current trials; it bears the 
impress of a time of severe sifting, a time when 
foundations were challenged, and individual faith 
put to even agonizing proofs, and the community 
threatened with an almost dissolution. Such a 
writing must have a voice articulate and sym- 
pathetic for a period like ours. 


THE PERSON OF CHRIST 3 


We will take into our hands then, portion by 
portion, this wonderful “ open letter,’ and listen 
through it to some of the things which “the 
Spirit saith ” to the saints and to the Church. 

We now contemplate in this sense the first 
two chapters. We put quite aside a host of 
points of profound interest in detail, and ask 
ourselves only what is the broad surface, the drift 
and total, of the message here. As to its climax, 
it is JESUS CHRIST, our “merciful and faithful 
High Priest” (ii. 17). As to the steps that 
lead up to the climax, they are a presentation of 

\_ the personal glory of Jesus Christ, as God the Son 
of God, as Man the Son of Man, who for us men 
and our salvation came, suffered, and prevailed. 

Who that reads the Bible with the least care 
has not often noted this in the first passages of 
the Hebrews, and could not at once so state the 
matter? What is the great truth of Hebrews i. ? 
Jesus Christ is Gop (ver. 8); the Son (ver. 2); 
absolutely uke the Father (ver. 3); Lord of the 
bright Company of Heaven, who in all their 
ranks and orders worship Him (ver. 6); creative 
Originator of the Universe (ver. 10), such that 
the starry depths of space are but the folds of 
His vesture, which hereafter He shall change for 
another (ver. 12); Himself eternal, “the same,” 
transcendent above all time, yet all the while 
the Son begotten, the Son, infinitely adequate 


4 CONSIDER HIM 


and infinitely willing to be the final Vehicle of 
the Father’s voice to us (verses 1, 5, 6). What 
is the great truth of Hebrews ii.? Jesus Christ 
is Man. He is other than angelic, for He is God. 
But also He is other than angelic, for He is Man 
(verses 5, 6, 7). He is the Brother of Man as 
truly as He is the Son of God (ver. 11). He has 
taken share with us in flesh and blood (ver. 14), 
that is to say, He has assumed manhood in that 
state or stage in which it is capable of death, and 
He has done this on purpose (it is a wonder- 
ful thought) that He may be capable of dying. 
This blessed Jesus Christ, this God and Man, 
our Saviour, was bent upon dying, and that for 
a reason altogether connected with us and with 
His will to save us (ver. 15). We were im- 
measurably dear and important to Him. And 
our deliverance demanded His identification with 
us in nature, and His temptations (ver. 18), and 
finally His mysterious suffermg. So He came, 
He suffered, He was “ perfected ”—in respect of 
capacity to be our Redeemer— through suffer- 
ings” (ver. 10). And now, incarnate, slain, and 
risen again, He, still our Brother, is “crowned 
with glory and honour” (ver. 9). He is our 
Leader (ver. 10). He is our High Priest, 
merciful and faithful (ver. 17). 

Thus the Epistle, on its way to recall its 
readers, at a crisis of confusion and temptation, 


CHRIST FIRST 5 


to certainty, patience, and peace, leads them— 
not last but first—to Jesus Christ. It unfolds 
at once to them His glories of Person, His 
wonder of Work and Love. It does not elabo- 
rately travel up to Him through general con- 
siderations. It sets out from Him. It makes 
Him the base and reason for all it has to say— 
and it has to say many things. Its first theme 


____ is not the Community, but the Lord; not Church 


principles, not that great duty of cohesion about 
which it will speak, and speak urgently, further 
on, but the Lord, in His adorable personal 
greatness, in His unique and all-wonderful 
personal achievement. To that attitude of 
thought it recurs again and again in its later 
stages. Im one way or another it is always 
bidding us look up from even the greatest 
related subjects and “ consider Him.” 

Am I not right in saying that here is a 
message straight to the restless heart of our 
time, and not least to the special conditions of 
Christian life just now in our well-beloved 
Church? We must, of course we must, think 
about a hundred problems presented by the 
circumference of the life of the Christian and 
the life of the Church. At all times such 
problems, asking for attention and _ solution, 
emerge to every thoughtful disciple’s sight. In 
our own time they seem to multiply upon one 


6 CONSIDER HIM 


another with an importunate demand—problems 
doctrinal, ritual, governmental, social; the strife 
of principles and tendencies within the Church ; 
all that is involved in the relations between 
the Church and the State, and again between the 
Church and the world, that is to say, human 
life in different or opposed to the living Christian 
creed and the spiritual Christian rule. 

Well, for these very reasons let us make here 
first this brief appeal, prompted by the opening 
paragraphs of the great Epistle. If you would 
deal aright with the circumference, earnest 
Christian of the English Church, live at the 

Centre. “Dwell deep.” From the Church 
come back evermore to Jesus Christ, that from 
Jesus Christ you may the better go back to the 
Church, bearing the peace and the power of the 
Lord Himself upon you. 

There is nothing that can serve as a substitute 
for this. The “consideration” of our blessed 

. Redeemer and King is not merely good for us; 


( _it is vital. To “behold His glory,” deliberately, 


with worship, with worshipping love, and seen 
by direct attention to the mirror of His Word, 
can and must secure for us blessings which we 
shall otherwise infallibly lose. This, and this 
alone, amidst the strife of tongues and all the 
perplexities of life, can develope in us at once 
the humblest reverence and the noblest liberty, 


A VITAL NEED 7 


convictions firm to resist a whole world in 
opposition, yet the meekness and the fear which 
utterly exclude injustice, untruth, hardness, or 
the bitter word. For us if for any, for us now 
if ever, this first great message of the Epistle 
meets a vital need; “ CoNSIDER Him.” 


CHAPTER II 


A HEART OF FAITH 


HEs. iii. 


E have just endeavoured to find a message, 

“godly and wholesome, and necessary for 

these times,’ in the opening paragraphs in the 

Epistle to the Hebrews. We come now to 

interrogate our oracle again, and we open the 
third chapter as we do so. 

Here again we find the Epistle full, first, of 
“Jesus Christ Himself.” He is “the Apostle 
and the High Priest of our profession” (ver. 1), 
or let us read rather, “our confession,” the 
“confession” of us who are loyal to His Name 
as His disciples. We are expressly called here 
to do what the first two chapters implied that 
we must do—to “consider Him” (ver. 1), to 
bend upon His Person, character, and work the 
attention of the whole heart and mind. We are 
pointed to His holy fidelity to His mission (ver. 2) 
in words which equally remind us of His sub- 
ordination to the Father’s will and of His 

8 


THE SON 9 


absolute authority as the Father’s perfect Re- 
presentative. We are reminded (ver. 3) of that 
magnificent other side of His position, that He acts 
and administers in “the house of God” not as a 
servant but as the Father’s “ own Son (ver. 6) that 
serveth Him.” Nay, such is He that the “ house” 
in which He does His filial service is a building 
which He Himself has reared (ver. 3); He is 
its Architect and its Constructor in a sense in 
which none could be who is not Divine. Yes, 
He is no less than God (ver. 4); God Filial, God 
so conditioned that He is also the faithful Sent- 
One of the Father, but none the less Gop. We 
saw Him already in the first chapter (ver. 10), 
placed before us in His majesty as the Originator 
of the material Universe, to whom the starry 
skies are but His robe, to be put on and put off 
in season. Here He is the doer of a yet more 
wonderful achievement; He is the Builder of 
the Church of the Faithful. For the “house” 
which He thus built is nothing else than “we” 
(ver. 6), we who by faith have entered into the 
structure of the “living stones” (see 1 Pet. ii. 5), 
and who, by “the confidence and the rejoicing of 
our hope,” abide within it. 

Thus the blessed Lord is before us here again, 
filling our sphere of thought and contemplation. 
It is here just as it is in the Epistle to the 
Colossians. There, as here, errors and confusions 


10 A HEART OF FAITH 


in the Church are in view—a subtle theosophy 
and also a retrograde ceremonialism, probably 
both amalgamating into one dangerous total. 
And St. Paul’s method of defence for his con- 
verts there—what is it? Above all, it is the 
presentation of Jesus Christ, in the glories of 
His Person and His Work. He places Him in 
the very front of thought, first as the Head, 
Founder, dnd Corner-stone of the Universe; 
then as the Head, Redeemer, and Life of the 
Church. With Him so seen he meets the 
dreamy thinker and the ceremonial devotee; 
Christ is the ultimate and only repose, alike 
for thought and for the soul. 

In this Epistle as in that we have the same 
phenomenon, deeply suggestive and seasonable 
for our life to-day. In both cases, not only for 
individuals but for the Church, there was mental 
and spiritual trouble. Alike in Phrygian Colossze 
and wherever the “ Hebrews” lived there was an 
invasion of church difficulties and confusion. A 
certain affinity in detail links the two cases 
together. Colossian Christians and Hebrew 
Christians, under widely different circumstances, 
and no doubt in very different tones, persuasive 
in one case, threatening in the other, were pressed 
to retrograde from the sublime simplicity and 
fulness of the truth. Their danger was what 
I may venture to call a certain medievalism. 


RETROGRESSION II 


Not Mosaism, not Prophetism, but Judaism, the 
successor and distortion of the ancient revela- 
tions, invited or commanded their adhesion, or, 
in the case of the “ Hebrews,” their return, as to 
the one true faith and fold. There were great 
differences in detail. At Colosse it does not 
seem that the “ medievalists” professed to deny 
Christianity ; rather they professed to teach the 
Judaistic version of it as the authentic type. 
Among the “Hebrews” anti-Christianity was 
using every effort to allure or to alarm the 
disciples back to open Rabbinism, “doing de- 
spite to the Son of God.” But both streams 
of tendency went in the same general direction 
so far that they put into the utmost prominence 
aspects of religion full of a traditional cere- 
monialism, and of the idea of human meritorious 
achievement rather than of a spiritual reliance 
for the salvation of the soul. 

Deeply significant it is that in both cases we 
have the danger met thus—by the presentation 
of the Incarnate Redeemer Himself, in His per- 
sonal and official glory, to the most immediate 
possible view of every disciple, “nothing between.” 
The Epistles, both of them, have much to say on 
deep general principles. But all this they say 
in vital connexion with Jesus Christ; and about 
Him they say most of all. He is the supreme 
Antidote. He, “considered,” considered fully, is 


12 A HEART OF FAITH 


not so much the clue out of the labyrinth as the 
great point of view from which the mind and the 
soul can look down upon it and see how tortuous, 
and also how limited, it is. 

But the message of our chapter has not yet 
been fully heard. It has spoken to us of Christ 
Jesus, and of the “consideration” of Him to 
which we are called. At its close it speaks to 
us of faith: “Take heed, lest there be in any of 
you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from 
the living God” (ver. 12). “To whom sware 
He that they should not enter into His rest, 
but to them that believed not? So we see that 
they could not enter in because of unbelief” 
(verses 18, 19). 

That is to say, our “consideration” of Jesus 
Christ must not be all our action towards Him, 
if we would be sure, and safe, and strong. It 
must be but the preliminary to a “heart of 
faith.” That is to say again, we must personally 
and practically take Him at His word, and rely 
upon Him, committing our souls and our all to 
Him, to Him directly, to Him solely. We must, 
in the exercise of this reliance, use Him ever- 
more as our Prophet, Priest, and King. We 
must venture upon His promises, just as Israel 
ought to have ventured upon the promises of 
Him who had redeemed them, although He 
tried their will and power to do so by the 


THE POWER OF FAITH rg 


terrors of the wilderness and by the giants of 
Canaan. 

Thus to rely is faith; for faith is personal 
confidence in the Lord in His promise. And 
such faith is not only, as it is, the empty hand 
which receives Divine blessings in detail. It is 
the empty arms which clasp always that com- 
prehensive blessing, the presence of “the living 
God” in Christ, so making sure of a secret of 
peace, of rest, of decision, of strength, of deep- 
sighted and tranquil thought upon “ things which 
differ,’ which is of infinite importance at a time 
of confusion and debate in the Christian Church. 

Therefore, alike for our safety and for our 
usefulness, let us first afresh “consider Him.” 
And then let us afresh “take heed” that with 
“a good heart of faith” we draw to and abide 
in union with the “considered” Christ, in whom 
we know and possess the living God. 


CHAPTER III 


UNTO PERFECTION 


HEs. iv.-vi. 


UR study of the great Epistle takes here 
another step, covering three short but 
pregnant chapters. So pregnant are they that 
it would be altogether vain to attempt to deal 
with them thus briefly were we not mindful of 
our special point of view. We are pondering 
the Epistle not for all that it has to say, but 
for what it has to say of special moment and 
application for certain needs of our own time. 
The outline of the portion before us must 
accordingly be traced. In detail it presents 
many questions of connexion and argument, 
for, particularly in chapter iv., the apostolic 
thought takes occasionally a parenthetical flight 
of large circuit. But in outline the progression 
may be traced without serious difficulty. 
We have first the appeal to exercise the 
promptitude and decision of faith, in view of 


the magnificent promise of a Canaan of sacred 
14 


THE WORD 18 


rest made to the true Israel in Christ. Even 
to “seem” (iv. 1) to fail of this, even to seem 
to sink into a desert grave of unbelief while 
“the rest of faith” is waiting to be entered, is 
a thought to “fear.” Great indeed are the 
promises; “living” and “energetic” is “the 
Word” which conveys them.* 

That “Word” is piercing as a sword in its 
convictions, for it is the vehicle of His mind 
and His holiness “with whom is concerned our 
discourse” (iv. 13); while yet it is, on its other 
side, a “Gospel” indeed (iv. 2), the message of 
supreme good, if only it is met with faith by 
the convicted soul. Yes, it is a message which 
tells of a land of “rest,” near and open, fairer 
far than the Canaan on which Caleb reported 
and from which he and his fellows brought the 
great clusters of its golden vines. Passage after 
passage of the old Scriptures (iv. 3—9) shows 
that that Canaan was no finality, no true f¢er- 
minus of the purpose of God; another “ rest,” 
another “day” of entrance and blessing, was 
intimated all along. Unbelief forfeited the true 
fruition of even the old Canaan for the old 
Israel. And now out of that evil has sprung 
the glorious good of a more articulate promise 
of the new Canaan, the inheritance of rest in 


* Ch, iv. 12, if I am right, follows in thought upon iv. 2, 
leaving a long and deep parenthesis between. 


16 UNTO PERFECTION 


Christ, destined for the new Israel. But as 
then, so now, the promise, if it is to come to its 
effect, must be met and realized by obedient faith. 
Despite all the difficulties, in face of what- 
ever may seem the Anakim of to-day, looking to 
Him who is immeasurably more than Moses, and 
who is the true and second Joshua,* we must 
make haste to enter in by the way of faith. 
We must “mingle the word with faith” (iv. 2), 
into one glorious issue of attained and abiding 
rest. We must lay our hearts soft and open 
(iv. 7) before the will of the Promiser. We 
must “be in earnest” to enter in (iv. 11). 

Then, at iv. 14, the appeal takes us in 
beautiful order more directly to Him who is 
at once the Leader and the Promised Land. 
And again He stands before us as a “great High 
Priest.” Our Moses, our Joshua, is also our 
more than Aaron, combining in Himself every 
possible qualification to be our guide and pre- 
server aS we enter in. He stands before us 
in all the alluring and endearing character of 
mingled majesty and mercy; a High Priest, a 
great High Priest, immeasurably great; He has 
“passed through the heavens” (iv. 14) to the 
Holiest, to the throne, the celestial mercey-seat 
(iv. 16) “within the veil” (vi. 19); He is the 
Son (v. 5); He is the Priest-King, the true 

* The ‘‘ Jesus” (iv. 8) of the Authorized Version. 


PHE GREAT HIGH ‘PRIEST a7 


Melchizedek ; He is all this for ever (vi. 20). 
But on the other hand He is the sinner’s 
Friend, who has so identified Himself in His 
blessed Manhood with the sinner, veritably 
taking our veritable nature, that He is “able 
to feel with our weaknesses” (iv. 15); “able 
to feel a sympathetic tolerance (wetpsoTaGetv) 
towards the ignorant and the wandering” (v. 2); 
understanding well “ what sore temptations mean, 
for He has felt the same”; yea, He has known 
what it is to “cry out mightily and shed tears” 
(v. 7) in face of a horror of death; to cast Him- 
self as a genuine suppliant, in uttermost suffering, 
upon paternal kindness; to get to know by 
personal experience what submission means 
(€uabe tiv wtmaxonv, v. 8); “not my will 
but Thine be done.” 

Such is the “ Leader of our faith,” so great, so 
glorious, so perfect, so tender, so deep in fellow- 
ship with us. Shall we not follow Him into 
“the rest,” though a “Jordan rolls between” 
and though cities of giants seem to frown upon 
us even on the other side? Shall we not dare 
thither to follow Him out of the desert of our 
“own works” ? 

Much, says the Epistle (v. 11, etc.), is to be 
said about Him; the theme is deep, it is in- 
exhaustible, for He is God and Man, one Christ. 
And the Hebrew believers (and is it not the 


2 


18 UNTO PERFECTION 


same with us?) are not quick to learn the great 
lesson of His glory, and so to grow into the 
adult manhood of grace. But let us try; let us 
address ourselves to “bear onwards (pepopcOa) 
to perfection” (vi. 1), in our thought, our faith, 
and so in our experience. The great foundation 
factors must be for ever there, the initial acts 
or attitudes of repentance, and of “faith towards 
God”; the abandonment of the service of sin, 
including the bondage of a would-be salvation 
of self by self, and the simple turning God-ward 
of a soul which has come to despair of its own 
resources—truths symbolized and sealed by the 
primal rites of baptism and blessing (vi. 2); and 
then the great revealed facts in prospect, resur- 
rection and judgment, must be always remem- 
bered and reckoned with. These however must 
be “left” (vi. 1), not in oblivion but in progress, 
just as a building “leaves” the level of its 
always necessary foundation. We must “bear 
onwards” and upwards, into the upper air of 
the fulness of the truth of the glory of our 
Christ. We must seek “perfection,” the pro- 
found maturity of the Christian, by a maturer 
and yet maturer insight into Him. Awful is 
the spiritual risk of any other course. The 
soul content to stand still is in peril of a 
_ tremendous fall. To know about salvation at 
all, and not to seek to develope the knowledge 


NEED AND LAW OF GROWTH 19 


towards “perfection,” is to expose one’s self 
to the terrible possibility of the fate reserved 
for those who have much light but no love 
(vi. 4-9).* But this, by the grace of God, shall 
not be for the readers of the Epistle. They 
have shewn living proofs of love already, 
practical and precious, for the blessed Name’s 
sake (vi. 10). Only, let them remember the 
spiritual law—the necessity of growth, of pro- 
gress, of “bearing onwards to perfection”; the 
| tremendous risks of a subtle stagnation; the 
looking back ; the pillar of salt. 

In order that full blessing may thus be theirs, 
let them look for it in the only possible direction. 
Let them take again to their souls the mighty 
promise of eternal benediction (vi. 14), sealed 
and crowned with the Promiser’s gracious oath 
in His own Name, binding Himself to fidelity 
under the bond of His own majesty (vi. 13). 
Aye, and then let them again “consider” Him 
in whom promise and oath are embodied and 
vivified for ever; in whom rests—nay, in whom 
consists—our anchor of an eternal hope (vi. 19); 
Jesus, our Man of men, our High Priest of the 
everlasting order, now entered “ within the veil,” 


*I make no attempt here to expound in detail the formidable 
words of vi. 4-8. But I believe that their purport is fairly 
described in the sentence above in the text. Their true scrip- 
tural illustrations are to be sought in a Balaam and a Judas, 





20 UNTO PERFECTION 


into the place of the covenant and the glory, and 
“as Forerunner on our behalf” (vi. 20). To 
follow Him in there, in the “consideration” of 
faith and of worshipping love—this is the secret, 
to the end, for “ bearing onwards to perfection.” 

Our review of the passage is thus in some sort 
over. Confessedly it is an outline; but I do not 
think that any vital element in the matter has 
been overlooked. Much of the message we are 
seeking has been inevitably given us by the 
way; we may be content now to gather up and 
summarize the main result. 

The “Hebrews,” then, and their special 
circumstances of difficulty, are here in view, 
as everywhere else in the Epistle. Tempted to 
“fall away,” to give up the “hope set before 
them,” to relapse to legalism, to bondage, to the 
desert, to a famine of the soul, to barrenness and 
death—here they are dealt with, in order to 
the more than prevention of the evil. And 
here, as ever, the remedy propounded is our 
Lord Jesus Christ, in His personal glory, in His 

majestic offices, in His unfathomable human 
sympathy, seen in perfect harmony of light with 
“His eternal greatness. 

The remedy is Christ ; a deeper, fuller, always 
maturing sight of Christ. The urgent necessity 
is first promptitude and then progress in respect 
of knowing Him. 


SOME PRESENT TENDENCIES 21 


At the risk of a charge of iteration and 
monotony, I reaffirm that here is the great 
antidote for the many kindred difficulties of our 
troubled time. From how many sides comes the 
strain! Sometimes from that of an open 
naturalism; sometimes from that of a partial 
yet far-reaching “naturalism under a veil” 
which some recent teachings on “The Being of 
Christianity ” may exemplify, with principles and 
presuppositions which largely underlie the 
extremer forms, certainly, of the modern critique 
of Scripture; sometimes from the opposite 
quarter of an ecclesiasticism which more or less 
exaggerates or distorts the great ideas of 
corporate life and sacramental operation. It 
would be idle to ignore the subtle nuances of 
difference between mind and mind, and the 
resultant varying incidence in detail of great 
and many-sided truths. But is it not fair and 
true to say that, on the whole, the supreme 
personal glory of Christ, as presented direct to 
the human soul in its august and ineffable 
loveliness, in its infinite lovableness, is what 
alike the naturalistic and the ultra-ecclesiastic 
theories of religion tend to becloud? On the 
other side, accordingly, it is in the “ considera- 
tion” of that glory, in acquaintance with 
that wonderful Christ, that we shall find the 
glow which can melt and overcome the cloud. 


22 UNTO PERFECTION 


We must put ourselves continually in face of the 
revelation of this in the Word of God. We must 
let that revelation so sink into the heart as to 
do its self-verifying work there thoroughly, yet 
with a growth never to be exhausted. We must 
“bear onwards ” evermore “ unto perfection ”—in 
“knowing Him.” So we shall stand, and live, 
and love, and labour on. 


CHAPTER IV 


OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK 


HEs, vii. 


HERE is a symmetrical dignity all its own 

in the seventh chapter of the Hebrews. I 
recollect listening, now many years ago, to a 
characteristic exposition of it by the late beloved 
and venerated Edward Hoare, in a well-known 
drawing-room at Cromer—a “Bible Reading” 
full alike of mental stimulus and spiritual force. 
He remarked, among many other things, that 
the chapter might be described as a sermon, 
divided under three headings, on the text of 
Psalm ex. 4. This division and its significance 
he proceeded to develope. The chapter opens 
with a preamble, a statement of the unique 
phenomena which surround, in the narrative of 
Genesis, the name and person of Melchizedek. 
Then, starting from the presupposition, to whose 
truth the Lord Himself is so abundantly a 
witness, that the Old Testament is alive every- 


where with intimations of the Christ, and 
23 


24 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK 


remembering that in the Psalm in question a 
mysterious import is explicitly assigned to 
Melchizedek, the Writer proceeds to his 
discourse. Its theme is the primacy of the 
priesthood embodied in Melchizedek over that 
represented by Aaron, and the bearing of this on 
the glory of Him who is proclaimed a priest for 
ever after Melchizedek’s order. This theme is pre- 
sented under headings, somewhat as follows. First 


(verses 4—14), the one priesthood. is greater than: 


the other i order. Abraham, bearing the whole 
Aaronic hierarchy potentially within him, defers 
to Melchizedek as to his greater. Hence, among 
other inferences, the sacred Personage who is a 
priest for ever after Melchizedek’s order, wholly 
independent of Levitical limits, must dominate 
and must supersede the order of the sons of Aaron 
with their inferior status and with their transitory 
lives. Secondly (verses 15-19), the one priest- 
hood is greater than the other in respect of the 
jinality, the permanence, the everlastingness, of 
the greater Priest and of His office. He is what 
He is “for ever, on the scale of the power of 
indissoluble life.”* As such, He is the Priest 
not of an introductory and transient “command- 
ment” but of that “ better hope ” which (ver. 19) 
has at last “made perfect” the purpose and the 
promise, fulfilled the intention of eternal mercy, 


* kara Otivamv Swis dkaradvrou. 


AN INSPIRED SERMON 25 


and brought us, the people of this great covenant, 
absolutely nigh to God. Thirdly (verses 20, 21), 
this second aspect of the supremacy of the 
greater Priesthood is emphasized and solemnized 
by one further reference to Psalm cx. 4. There 
the Eternal, looking upon the mysterious Partner 
of His throne, is heard not to promise only but 
to vow, with an oath unalterable as Himself, that 
the Priesthood of “His Fellow” shall be ever- 
lasting. No such solemnity of affirmation 
attended Aaron’s investiture. There is something 
greater here, and more immediately Divine. The 
“covenant” (ver. 22) committed to the admini- 
stration of One thus sealed with the oath of 
Heaven must indeed be “ better,’ and cannot but 
be final; the goal of the eternal purpose. 

Then (verses 25—28) the discourse passes into 
what we may call its epilogue. The thought 
recurs to the sublime contrast between the 
pathetic numerousness of the successors of Aaron, 
“not suffered to continue by reason of death,” and 
the singleness, the “unsuccessional” identity for 
ever, of the true Melchizedek, who abides eter- 
nally. And then, moving to its end, the argu- 
ment glows and brightens into an “application ” 
to the human heart. We have in JEsus (the 
Name has now already been pronounced, ver. 22) 
a Friend, an Intercessor, infinitely and for ever 
competent to save us, His true Israel. We 


26 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK 


have in Him a High Priest supreme in every 
attribute of holiness and power, and qualified 
for His work of intercession by that sacrifice 
of Himself which is at once solitary and all- 
sufficient. Behold then the contrast and the 
conclusion. To a great Dispensation, the pre- 
paratory, succeeds a greater, the greatest, the 
other’s end and crown. To the “weak” mortal 


priesthood of the law, never warranted by the 


vow of God to abide always in possession, 
succeeds One who is Priest, and King, and Son, 
sealed for His office by the irrevocable vow, 
“consecrated for evermore.” 

Such on the whole, as I recall it, was the 
exposition of my venerable friend, in 1887. 
Each new reading of the chapter seems to me 
to bear out the substantial accuracy of it; 
indeed the symmetry and order of the chapter 
make it almost inevitable that some such line 
should be taken by the explanation. Thus then 
it lies before us. It is filled in all its parts 
with Jesus Christ, in His character of the true 
Melchizedek, our final, everlasting, perfect, 
supreme, Divine High Priest. 

This simple treatise is not the place for 
critical discussions. I do not attempt a formal 
vindication of the mystical and Messianic refer- 
ence of Psalm cx. All I can do here, and 


perhaps all I should do, is to affirm solemnly my 


“ ae 2 


PSALM CX a7 


belief in it, at the feet of Christ. Iam perfectly 
aware that now, within the Church, and by men 
unquestionably Christian as well as learned, our 
Lord’s own interpretation of that Psalm,* involv- 
ing as it does His assertion of its Davidic ' 
authorship, is treated as quite open to criticism 
and disproof. One such scholar does not hesitate 
to say that, if the majority of modern experts 
are right as to the non-Davidic authorship, and 
he seems to think that they are, “our Lord’s 
argument breaks down.” All I would remark 
upon such utterances, coming from men who all 
the while sincerely adore Christ as their Lord 
and God, is that they must surely open the way 
towards conceptions of His whole teaching which 
make for the ruin of faith. For the question is 
not at all whether our Redeemer consented to | 
submit to limits in His conscious human know- | 
ledge; I for one hold that He assuredly did so. © 
It is whether He consented to that sort of 
limitation which alone, in respect of imperfection ; 
of knowledge, is the real peril of a teacher, and 
which is his fatal peril—the ignorance of his 
own ignorance, and a consequent claim to teach 
where he does not know. In human schools 
the betrayal of that sort of ignorance is a death- 
blow to confidence, not only in some special 
utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at 
* Matt. xxii, 44; Luke xx. 42. Cp. Acts ii. 34. 


—_—— 





28 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK 


his claim not to knowledge so much as to 
wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I 
venture to say that recent drifts of speculation 
shew how rapidly the conception of a fallible 
Christ developes towards that of a wholly im- 
perfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking 
again at the vast phenomenon of the Portrait in 
the Gospels, I hold that the line of thought 
which offers by very far the least difficulty, not 
to faith only but to reason, is that which relies 
absolutely on His affirmations wherever He is 


pleased actually to affirm. 


So thinking, I take His exposition of Psalm ex. 
as for me final. And that exposition guarantees 
at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv. 
and the rightness of its development in the 
passage here before us. 

But now, what “message” has our chapter 
for us, in view of the needs of our own time ? 

First, as to its sacerdotal doctrine. It throws 
a broad illumination on the grand finality and 
uniqueness of the mediatorial priesthood of our 
Lord, the Son of God. It puts into the most 
vivid possible contrast the age of “the law” and 
that of Christ as to the priestly conception and 
institution. Somehow, under the law, there was 
a need for priests who were “men, having in- 
firmity.” For certain grave purposes (not for 
all, by any means, even in that legal period) it 


MEDIATORIAL PRIESTHOOD 29 


was the will of God that they should stand 
between His Israel and Him. SBut the argument 
of this chapter, unless it elaborately veils its 
true self in clouds, goes directly to shew that 
such properly mediatorial functions, in the age of 
Christ, are for ever withdrawn from “ men, having 
infirmity.” Where they stood of old, one after 
another, sacrificing, interceding, going in behind 
the veil, permitted to draw nearer to God, in an 
official sanctity, than their brethren, there now 
stands Another, sublime, supreme, alone. He is 
Man indeed, but He is not “man _ having 
infirmity.” He is higher than the heavens, 
while He is one with us. And now our one 
secret for a complete approach to God is to 
come to God “through Him.” And this, unless 
the chapter is an elaborate semblance of what 
it is not, means nothing if it does not mean 


that between the Church, and between the soul, \~ 


and the Lord Jesus Christ, there is to come 
absolutely nothing mediatorial. As little as the 
Jew, for ceremonial purposes, needed an inter- 
mediary in dealing with his mortal priest so 
little do we, for the whole needs of our being, 
need an intermediary in dealing with our eternal 
Priest. 

In the age of Christ, no office can for one 
moment put one “man having infirmity ” nearer 
to God than another, if this chapter means what 


- 


30 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK 


it says. Mediatorial priesthood, a very different 
thing from commissioned pastorate, has no place 
in apostolic Christianity, with the vast exception 
of its sublime and solitary place in the Person of 
our most blessed Lord. 

Then further, the chapter, far from giving us 
merely the cold gift (as is would be if this were 
all) of a negative certainty against unlawful 
human claims, gives us, as its true, its inmost 
message, a glorious positive. It gives us the 
certainty that, for every human heart which 
asks for God, this wonderful Christ, personal, 
eternal, human, Divine, is quite immediately 
accessible. The hands of need and trust have 
but to be lifted, and they hold Him. And He 
is the Son. In Him we have the FATHER. 
We do indeed “draw nigh to God through 
Him.” 

Therefore we will do it. The thousand con- 
fusions of our time shall only make this Divine 
simplicity the more precious to us. We will 
at once and continually take Jesus Christ for 
granted in all the fulness and splendour of His 
High-priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. 
That Priesthood is for ever what it is; it is as 
new and young to-day in its virtue as if the oath 
had but to-day been spoken, and He had but 
to-day sat down at the right hand. 

Happy we if we use Him thus. He blesses 


A STORY OF GRACE 31 


those who do so with blessings which they can- 
not analyse, but which they know. Many years | ~— 
ago a Christian lady, daughter of a saintly Non- 
conformist pastor in ‘the west of Dorset, told 
me how, in a then distant time, her father had 
striven to teach a sick man, a young gipsy in 
a wandering camp, to read, and to come to 
Christ. The camp moved after a while, and 
the young man, dying of consumption, took a 
Bible with him. Time rolled on, and one day 
a gray-haired gipsy came to the minister’s door ; 
it was the youth’s father, with the news of his 
son’s happy death, and with his Bible. “Sir, 
I cannot read a word; but he was always 
reading it, and he marked what he liked with 

——.a_stick from the fire. And he said you would 
find one place marked with two lines; it was 
everything to my poor lad.” The leaves were 
turned, and the stick was found to have scored 
two lines at the side of Heb. vil. 25: “He is | 
able also to save them to the uttermost that | 
come unto God by Him, seeing that He ever / 
liveth to make intercession for them.” 


CHAPTER V 


THE BETTER COVENANT 


HEs, viii. 


HE Person and greatness of our High Priest 
are now full before the readers of the 
Epistle. The paragraph we enter next, after 
one more deliberate contemplation of His 
dignity and His qualifications, proceeds to ex- 
pound His relation to the better and eternal 
Covenant. We shall find here also messages 
appropriate to our time. 
The first step then is a review, a summing up, 
a “look again” upon the true King of Right- 
eousness and peace (verses 1, 2). “Such a 
High Priest we have.” It is a wonderful affir- 
mation, not only of His existence but of His 
relation to “us,” His people. “We have” Him. 
He has taken His seat indeed “at the right 
hand of the throne of the majesty in the 
heavens.” But this great exaltation has not 
removed Him for a moment out of our posses- 


sion; we have Him. He is now the great 
32 





WE HAVE ST Bee 


Minister, the supreme sacerdotal Functionary, 
of the heavenly sanctuary, “the true taber- 
nacle,” THs oxnvis THs adnOuv7js, the non-figura- 
tive reality of which the Mosaic structure was 
only the shadow; the true scene of unveiled 
Presence and immortal worship, “pitched” by 
Him whose face makes Heaven, and makes it all 
_one temple. But this sublimity of our Priest’s 
place and power does not make Him in the 
least less ours; we have Him. 

The words invite us to a new and deliberate 
look upward, and then to a recollection deeper 
than ever that He is held spiritually in our 
very hands; that He is a possession, nearer to 
us than any other. 

Then (verses 3 and following) the thought 
moves towards the sacrificial and offertorial 
qualifications of this great and most sacred 
Person. He is what He is, our High Priest, 
our Minister of the sanctuary above, on perfectly 
valid grounds. For He is, what every sacerdotal 
minister must be, an Offerer. And He is this 
in a sense, in a way, congruous to His heavenly 
position. He has no blood of goats and 
calves to present, like the priests on earth. 
Indeed, were He “on earth” (ver. 4), this 
greatest of all High Priests “ would not even be 
a priest” (ovd av Av fepeds), an ordinary priest. 
For that function, says the Writer, is already filled, 

3 


3, OM ee 


34 THE BETTER COVENANT 


“according to the law,” by the Aaronic order, to 
which He never belonged and never could 
belong (see vii. 13, 14). It is in charge of the 
sacred servants (Aatpevovow) of the earthly 
sanctuary, the God-given type and shadow 
(ver. 5) of the realities of Heaven, but no more 
than their type and shadow, partial and transient. 
No, His sacerdotal qualification is of another 
sort and a greater. What it is which “He 
hath to offer” in the celestial Holiest is not yet 
explicitly said; that is reserved for the ninth 
chapter, to which this is but the vestibule. But 
already the Epistle emphasizes the truth that 
“He hath somewhat to offer,” so that we may 
fully realize the completeness of His high- 
priestly power. 

It may be well to pause here, and to ask 
whether this passage reveals that our Lord 
Jesus Christ is at this moment “ offering” for us, 
in His heavenly life. We are all aware that 
this has been widely held and earnestly pressed, 
sometimes into inferences which, as far as I can 
see, cannot at all be borne even by the doctrine 
that He is offering for us now. In particular it 
is said that, if He in glory is offering for His 
Church, then His Church must, in some sense, as 
in a counterpart, be offering here on earth, in union 
with Him. In short, there must still be priests 
on earth who are ministers of “the example 


OFFERING AND OFFERER 35 


and shadow of heavenly things.” But surely, if 
this Epistle makes anything clear, it makes it 
clear that our great Priest is the superseding 
fulfilment of all such ministrations done by 
“men having infirmity.” It is His glory, and 
it is ours, that He is known by us as our one 
and all-sufficient Offerer and Mediator. It is 
precisely as such that “we have Him,” in a way 
to distinguish our position and privilege in a 
magnificent sense from that of those who needed 
the sacerdotal aid of their mortal brethren. 

But then further, does this passage really 
intimate at all that He is offering now? The 
thought appears to be decisively negatived by 
the grandeur of the terms of the first verse of 
this chapter. Where, in the heavenly sanctuary, 
is our High Priest now? He has “taken His 
seat on the right hand of the throne of the 
majesty.” But enthronement is a thought out 
of line with the act and attitude of oblation. 
The offerer stands before the Power he ap- 
proaches. Our Priest is seated——-where Deity 
alone can sit. 

Does not this tell us that the words (ver. 3), 
“Tt is necessary that He too should have some- 
thing to offer,’ are to be explained not of a 
continuous historical procedure (to which idea, 
by the way, the aorist verb mpocevéyxn would 
hardly be appropriate), but as the statement of a 


36 THE BETTER COVENANT 


principle in terms of time? The “necessity” is, 
not that He should have something to offer now, 
and to-morrow, and always, but that the matter 
and act of offering should belong to Him. And 
they do so belong, in principle and effect, for 
priestly purposes, by having been once and for 
ever handled and performed by Him. His 
“need ” is, not to be always offering, but to be 
always an Offerer. He meets that need by 
being for ever the Priest who- had Himself to 
offer, and who offered Himself, and who now 
dispenses from His sacerdotal seat the benedic- 
tions based upon the sacrifice of which He is for 
ever the once accepted Offerer. 

Only thus viewed, I venture to say, can this 
phrase be read in its full harmony with the 
whole Epistle. “He hath somewhat to offer,” 
in the sense that He has for ever the grand 
sacerdotal qualification of being an Offerer who, 
having executed that function, now bears to all 
eternity its character. But He is not therefore 
always executing the function. Otherwise He 
must descend from His throne. But His en- 
thronement, His session, is a fact of His present 
position as important and characteristic as 
possible in this whole Epistle. 

Aaron was not always offering. But he was 
always an offerer. On the morrow of the 
Atonement Day he was as much an offerer 





WHAT THE COVENANT IS_ = 37 


as on the day itself. All through the year, 
even until the next Atonement, he was still an 
offerer. He exercised his priestly functions at 
all times because, in principle, he “had some- 
what to offer” in its proper time. Our High 
Priest knows only one Atonement Day, and it is 
over for ever. And His Israel have it for their 
privilege and glory not to be “serving unto an 
example and shadow” of even His work and 
office, but to be going always, daily and hourly, 
direct to Him in His perfect Priesthood, in which 
they always “have” Him, and to be always 
abiding, in virtue of Him, “boldly,” “with con- 
fidence,” in the very presence of the Lord. 

Then the chapter moves forward (verses 6 and 
following) to consider the relation between our 
High Priest and the Covenant of which He is the 
Mediator. Here begins one of the great themes 
of the Epistle. It will recur again and again, 
till at last we read (xiii. 20) of “the blood of 
the Covenant eternal.” 

This pregnant subject is introduced by a solemn 
reference to the “promises upon which has , 
been legislated,” legally insituted, vevopoder/Tar, » 
this new compact between God and man. The 
reference is to the thirtieth chapter of Jeremiah, 
from which an extract is here made at length. 
There the prophet, in the name of his God, ex- 
plicitly foretells the advent of what we may 


38 THE BETTER COVENANT 


reverently call a new departure in the revealed 
relations between Jehovah and His people. At 
Sinai He had engaged to bless them, yet under 
conditions which left them to discover the total 
inability of their own sin-stricken wills to meet 
His holy while benignant will. They failed, they 
broke the pact, and judgment followed them of 
course. But now another order is to be taken. 
Their King and Lawgiver, without for one 
moment ceasing to be such, will also undertake 
another function, wholly new, as regards the 
method of covenant. He will place Himself so 
upon their side as Himself to readjust and 
empower their affections and their wills. He 
“will put His laws into their mind and write 
them upon their hearts,” and “they shall all 
know Him,” with the knowledge which is life 
eternal. And further, as the antecedent to all 
this, in order to open the path to it, to place 
them where this wonderful blessing can rightly 
reach and fill them, their King and Lawgiver 
pledges Himself to a previous pardon, full and 
unreserved ; “Their sins and their iniquities 
I will remember no more.” They shall be set 
before Him in an acceptance as full as if they 
had never fallen. And then, not as the condition 
to this but as the sequel to it, He will so deal 
with them, internally and spiritually, that they 
shall will His will and live His law. There shall 


THE TWO COVENANTS 39 


be no mechanical compulsion; “their mind,” 
“their hearts,” full as ever of personality and 
volition, shall be the matter acted upon. But 
there shall be a gracious and prevailing influence, 
deciding their spiritual action along its one true 
line; “I will put,” “I will write.” 

This is the new, the better, the everlasting 
Covenant. It is placed here in the largest and 
most decisive contrast over against the old 
covenant, the compact of Sinai, “written and 
engraven in stones” (2 Cor. iii. 7). That com- 
pact had done its mysterious work, in convincing 
man of his sinful incapacity to meet the will of 
God. Now emerges its wonderful antithesis, in 
which man is first entirely pardoned, with a pardon 
which means acceptance, peace, re-instatement 
into the home and family of God, and then and 
therefore is internally transfigured by his Father’s 
power into a being who loves his Father's law. 

What the prophet foretold was claimed by 
the Lord Christ Himself, as fulfilled in His 
Person and His work, when He took the cup of 
blessing, at the feast of the new Passover of the 
new Israel, and said, “This cup is the new 
covenant in my blood.” And what He so 
claimed His great apostle rejoiced in, when he 
wrote to Corinth (2 iii. 6, etc.) of the “ ministry 
of the new covenant,” the covenant of the Spirit, 
of life, of glory. And here the same truth is 


40 THE BETTER COVENANT 


stated again, and in strong connexion again with 
Him who is at once its Sacrifice, its Surety, its 
Mediator; the Cause, and Guardian, and Giver 
of all its blessings. He is such that it is such; 
ours is “so great a salvation,” because of so great 
and wonderful a High Priest, the possessor in 
very deed of “somewhat to offer,” and now, with 
hands full of the fruits of that offering, “ seated ” 
for us “on the right hand of the throne of the 
majesty in the heavens.” 

Here is a message for our times, in a sense 
which seems to me special, pressing, and deeply 
beneficent. For the terms of that new covenant 
are nothing less than the glorious essence, the 
Divine peculiarity, of the Gospel of the grace of 
God. This forgiveness, this most sincere and 
entirely unearned amnesty, this oblivion of the 
sins of the people of God—do we hear very 
much about it now, even where by tradition it 
might be most expected? But do we not need 
it now? Was there ever a time when human 
hearts would be more settled and more energized 
than now, amidst their moral restlessness, by a 
wise, thoughtful, but perfectly unmistakable re- 
affirmation of the sublime fulness of Divine 
forgiveness in Christ? Men may think that 
they can do without that message. They may 
bid us throw the whole weight of preaching upon 
self-sacrifice, upon social service, upon conduct at 


A TIMELY TRUTH 41 


large. But the fully wakeful soul knows that 
itis only then capacitated for self-sacrifice in the 
Lord’s footsteps when it has received the warrant 
of forgiveness, written large in His sacred blood, 
finding pardon and peace at the foot of His 
sacrificial Cross. Then turn to the second limb 
of the covenant, a limb greater even than the 
first, inasmuch as for it the first is provided and 
guaranteed. Do we hear too much about this / 
covenant blessing now? Do our pulpits too 
frequently and too fully give out the affirmation 
that God in Christ stands pledged and covenanted 
to work the moral transfiguration of His believing 
Israel, to act so on “ the first springs of thought 
and will” that our being shall freely respond to 
His free action upon it, and will His will, and 
live His law? But was there ever greater need 
for such an affirmation than in our time, so 
restless, so unsatisfied, and, deep below all 
its superficial arrogance, so disappointed, so 
discouraged ? 

Let us return upon the rich treasures of this 
great Compact of God in Christ. The Covenant 
is ever new, for it is eternal. And it lies safe in 
the ministering hands of Him who died to 
inaugurate it and make it good, and who lives to 
shower its blessings down. He is on the right 
hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens. 
And “we have” Him. 


CHAPTER VI 


SANCTUARY AND SACRIFICE 


HEsp, ix. 


HE Epistle has exhibited to us the glory of the 
eternal Priest and the wealth and grandeur 
of the new Covenant. It advances now towards 
the Sanctuary and the Sacrifice wherein we see 
that covenant sanctified and sealed, under the 
auspices of our great “ Priest upon His throne.” 
The Teacher first dilates to the Hebrews 
upon the outstanding features of the type. He 
enumerates the main features of that “sanctuary, 
adapted to this (visible) world” (To ayop, 
kocutkov), which was attached to the first 
covenant (ver. 1).* Particularly, he emphasizes 
its double structure, which presented first a 
consecrated chamber, holy but not holiest, the 
depository of lamp and table, but then beyond 
it, parted from it by the inner curtain, the 
adytum itself, the Holiest Place, where lay ready 
* Assuredly we must delete cxnv7% from the text in this verse, 


and understand d.a4)xy (see viii. 13) after 7 rpérn. 
42 


THE HOLIEST 43 


for use “a golden censer,” the vessel needful for 
the making of the incense-cloud which should 
veil the glory, and, above all, the Ark of that 
first covenant of which so much has now been 
said. There it lay, with the manna and the 
budding rod, symbols of Mosaic and Aaronic 
power and function; and the tablets of that 
law which was written not on the heart but on 
the stone; and the mercy-seat above them, and 
the cherubic bearers of the Shechinah above the 
mercy-seat ; symbols of a reconciliation and an 
access yet to be revealed (verses 2—5). 

Such was the sanctuary, as depicted to the 
mind of the believing Hebrew in the books 
which he almost worshipped as the oracles of 
God. That tabernacle he had never seen; that 
ark he knew had long vanished out of sight. 

~.__The temple of Herod, with its vacant Holiest, 
was the sanctuary of his generation. But the 
Mosaic picture of the Tent and of the Ark was 
for him the abiding standard, the Divine ideal, 
the pattern of the realities in the heavens ; and to 
it accordingly the Epistle directs his thought, as it 
prepares to display those realities before him.* 

* I do not attempt in these papers to do more than allude 
to the controversy of our time over the historical character 
of the Mosaic books, But I must allude in passing to a note- 
worthy German critique of the Wellhausen theory, ‘“‘by a 


former adherent,” W. Moller: Bedenken gegen die Graf- 
Weithausensche Hypothese, von einem friiheren Anhdnger 


: Te sde ie 


44 SANCTUARY AND SACRIFICE 


Then it proceeds to a similar presentation of 
one great feature in the ritual, the “ praxis,” 
connected with this Tent of Sanctuaries. It 
takes the reader to his Book of Leviticus, and 
to its order of Atonement. There (ch. xvi.) 
a profound emphasis is laid upon both the 
secluded sanctity of the inner shrine, the place 
of the Presence, and the sacrificial process by 
which alone the rare privilege of entrance into 
it could be obtained. The outer chamber was 
the daily scene of priestly ministration. But 
the inner was, officially at least, entered once 
only in the year, and by the High Priest alone, 
in the solitary dignity of his office. And even 
he went in there only as bearing in his very 
hands the blood of immolated victims, blood 
which he offered, presented, in the Holiest, with 
an express view to the Divine amnesty for 
another year’s tale of “ignorances” (ayvonpata, 
ver. 7), his own and the people’s. 

Such was the sanctuary, such the atoning 
ritual, attached to the first covenant. All was 
“mysteriously meant,” with a significance in- 


(Giitersloh, 1899). The writer, a young and vigorous student 
and thinker, explains with remarkable force the immense 
difficulties from the purely critical point of view in the way 
of the theory that the account of the Tabernacle was invented 
by ‘‘Levitistic” leaders of the time of the Captivity. The 
work has been translated into English, and published by the 
Religious Tract Society ‘* Ave the Critics right?” 


THE ANTITYPE 45 


finitely deeper than what any thought of Moses, 
or of Ezra, could of itself have given it. “The 
Holy Ghost intimated” (ver. 8), through that 
guarded shrine and those solitary, seldom-granted, 
death-conditioned entrances into it, things of 
uttermost moment for the soul of man. There 
stood the Tent, there went in the lonely Priest, 
with the blood of bull and goat, as “a parable 
for the period now present,” * the time of the 
Writer and his readers, in which a ritual of 
offering was still maintained whose annual re- 
currence proved its inadequacy, its non-finality. 
Yes, this majestic but sombre system pictured 
a state of jealous reserve between the worship- 
pers and their God. Its propitiations were of 
a kind which, in the nature of things, could not 
properly and in the way of virtual force set the 
conscience free from the sense of guilt, “per- 
fecting the worshipper conscience-wise.” They 
could only “sanctify with a view to the purity 
of the flesh” (ver. 13), satisfying the conditions 
of a national and temporal acceptance. Its 
holiest place was indeed approachable, once 
annually, by one representative person; enough 

*T think the Revisers are right in giving ‘‘now present” 
instead of ‘‘then present” as the rendering for tov éveornkéra 
(ver. 9). The Epistle alludes, so I should conjecture, to the 
period of its writing as a time when the sacrifices were still going 


on, albeit on the eve of cessation.—It seems best to read xa’ jv, 
not kaé’ dv, in ver. 9: ‘‘in accordance with which parable.” 


46 SANCTUARY AND SACRIFICE 


to illustrate and to seal a hope; but otherwise, 
and far more deeply, the conditions symbolized 
separation and a Divine reserve. But “the good 
things to come” * were in the Divine view all 
along. The “time of reformation” (ver. 10), 
of the rectification of the failures suffered under 
the first covenant, drew near. Behold Messiah 
steps upon the scene, the true High Priest 
(ver. 11).. Victim and Sacrificer at once, He 
sheds His own sacrificial blood (ver. 12) on 
the altar of Golgotha, to be’ His means (8a 
c. gen.) of acceptable approach. And then He 
passes, through the avenue of a sanctuary “not 
made with hands” (ver. 11), even the heavenly 
world itself (cp. SueAnArvOota Tods ovdpavois, 
iv. 14), into the Holiest Place of the eternal 
Presence on the throne. He goes in thither, 
there to be, and there to do, all that we know 
of from the long context previous to this chapter, 
even to sit down accepted at the right hand of 
the majesty on high, King of Righteousness and 
Peace. And this action and entrance is, in its 
very nature, a thing done once and for ever. 
The true High Priest, being what He is, doing 
what He has done, has indeed “found eternal 
redemption for us” (ver. 12). It is infinitely 


** Possibly we should read ry yevouévwr dyabGr, “the good 
things that are come’ (R.V. marg.). But the practical differ- 
ence is not great. 





BY MEANS OF DEATH 47 


unnecessary now to imagine a repetition of sacri- 
fice, entrance, offering, acceptance, for Him, and 
for us in Him. Such an Oblation, the self-offer- 
ing of the Incarnate Son in the power of the 
Eternal Spirit (ver. 14), what can it not do for 
the believing worshipper’s welcome in, and his 
perfect peace in the assurance of the covenanted 
love of God? Is it not adequate to “purge the 
conscience from dead works,” to lift from it, that 
is to say, the death-load of unforgiven transgres- 
sions, and to lead the Christian in, as one with 
his atoning Lord, “ to serve a living God,” with the 
happy service of a worshipper (Aatpevevv) who need 
“go no more out” from the Holy Place of peace ? 

But the Teacher has not yet done with the 
wealth of the Mosaic types of our full salvation. 
He has more to say about the profound truth 
that the New Covenant needed for its Mediator, its 
Herald, its Guarantor and Conveyer of blessing, 
not a Moses but a Messiah, who could both die 
and reign, could at once be Sacrifice and Priest. 
Covenants, in the normal order of God’s will in 
Scripture, demanded death for their ratification. 
“Where covenant is, there must be brought in ) 
the death of the covenant-victim.” * So it was 


* So, with the late Professor Scholefield (Hints on a New 
Translation) I venture to render rod diuadeuévov, I am con- 
vinced that this rendering, though it has the serious difficulty 
of lacking any clear parallel to certify the application of 
diafepuévou, is necessitated by the connexion. 


Ps a eal 
, > 


48 SANCTUARY AND SACRIFICE 


with the old covenant (verses 18—21) in the 
narrative of Exodus xxiv. So, throughout the 
Mosaic rules, we find “remission,” practically 
always, conditioned by “blood-shedding” (ver. 
22). Peace with violated holiness was to be 
attained only by means of sacrificial death. 
The terrestrial sanctuary, viewed as polluted 
by the transgressions of the worshippers who 
sought its benefits, required sacrificial death, the 
blood of bulls and goats, so to “cleanse” it that 
God could meet Israel there in peace (ver. 23). 
Even so, only after a higher and holier order, 
must it be with the better covenant and that 
invisible sanctuary where a reconciled God may 
for ever meet in peace His spiritual Israel. 
There must be priestly immolation and an 
offered sacrifice; there must be peace con- 
ditioned by life-blood shed. And such is the 
work of our Messiah-Priest. He has “borne 
the sins of many” (ver. 28). Presenting Him- 
self (ver. 6) as the Atonement Victim, in the 
heavenly MHoliest, He has thereby “borne,” 
uplifted (aveveyxetv), in that Presence, for 
pardon and peace, the sins of the new Israel. 
And so “the heavenly things” are, relatively 
to that Israel, “cleansed”; their God can meet 
them in that sanctuary with an intimacy and 
access free and perfect, because their High 
Priest and Mediator has done His work for 


BY MEANS OF DEATH 49 


them. For ever and ever now they need no 
new sacrifice; His blood, once shed, is eternally 
sufficient. Aye, and they need now for ever no 
repeated offering (ver. 25) of sacrifice, no new 
presentation of His blood before the throne, since 
once He has taken His place upon it. To offer 
again He must suffer again (ver. 26). For it is 
the law of His office first to offer—and then to 
take His place at the right hand. He must leave 
that place, He must descend again to a cross, if 
He is to take again the attitude of presentation. 
“Henceforth” He sits, “expecting” (see below, 
x. 13), “till His enemies be made His footstool.” 
And His Israel on their part wait (ver. 28), 
“expecting,” till in that bright promised day 
“He appears, the second time, without-sin,” un- _ 
encumbered by the burthen He once carried for 
them, “ unto salvation,” the salvation which means 
the final glory. “Once, only once ”—+this is the 
sublime law of that Sacrifice and that Offering. 
As death for us men comes “once,” and then 
there follows “judgment,” so the death of Christ, 
the “ offering”, of Christ, comes “ once,” and then 
comes, in a wonderful paradox, not judgment but 
“ salvation,” for them that are found in Him. 
The messages of this chapter for our time 
are equally manifest and weighty. It closes 
with the assertion of a principle which should 
be for all time decisive against all sorts and 
4 


oe Re SAD PR 
‘A War4< 


50 SANCTUARY AND SACRIFICE 


forms of “re-presentation” of the Lord our 
Sacrifice. He has “offered” Himself once and 
for ever, and is now, on our behalf, not in the 
Presence only but upon the Throne. Yet more 
urgent, more vital, if possible, is the affirmation 
here of the need and of the virtue of His 
vicarious death. The chapter puts His blood- 
shedding before us in a way as remote as 
possible from a mere example, or from a 
suffering meant to do its work mainly by a 
mysterious impartation to us of the power to 
suffer. He dies “for the redemption of the 
' transgressions under the first covenant ”—in 
other words, for the welcome back to God of 
those who had sinned against His awful Law. 
He dies that we, “the called,” “might receive 
the promise of an eternal inheritance.” He dies, 
He offers, that we, wholly and solely because He 
has done so, may find the heavenly, invisible, 
spiritual Holiest a place of perfect peace with 
God, dwelling in it as in our spirits’ home. 

Are these the characteristic accents of the 


“voice of the modern Church? Have we not 


need to listen again, reverent and believing, 
to the ninth chapter of the Hebrews, as it 
discourses about sanctuary, and sacrifice, and 
offering, and peace ? 


CHAPTER VII 


FULL, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT 


Hep. x. 


HE heaven-taught Teacher has led us now 
along the avenue of the Levitical fore- 
shadowings, through the prophetic symbolism of 
the old high-priesthood, through the holy place and 
the holiest. The pathway, marked by the blood 
of animal sacrifices, hallowing the awful terms 
of the covenant of works, has brought us to the 
true Tabernacle and true Sacrifice, to the better 
and final Covenant, to the supreme High Priest. 
The teaching has left us, as the ninth chapter 
closes, “ looking up steadfastly into heaven,” recol- 
lecting where the Lord is and why He is there; 
thinking how we, His Israel, “ have Him” for our 
Representative and Mediator as He “appears in 
the presence of God for us,” and expecting the 
hour of joy and glory when He will put aside 
the curtains of that tabernacle, and come forth to 
crown us with the final benediction, receiving us 


“unto the salvation ” of eternity (ix. 27, 28). 
51 


52 FULL, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT 


It is a solemn but a happy attitude. It can 
be taken by those only who have “ fled for refuge 
to the hope set before them.” But they are to 
take it, as those who feel beneath their feet the 
rock of an assured salvation and know their 
open way to the heart of God. 

The argument now proceeds in living con- 
tinuity. Its business now is to accentuate and 
develope -the supremacy, the ultimacy—if the 
word may be allowed—of the finished work of 
the true High Priest, in contrast to the pro- 
visional and preparatory “law.” The Writer has 
said much to us in this way before, particularly 
in the preceding three chapters of the Epistle. 
But he must emphasize it again, for it is the 
inmost purport of his whole discourse. And he 
must do it now with the urgency of one who has 
in view a real peril of apostasy. His readers 
are hard pressed, by persuasions and by terrors, 
to turn back from Christ to the Judaistic 
travesty of the message of the Law. He must 
tell them not only of the splendour of Messiah’s 
work but of the absolute finality of it for man’s 
salvation. To forsake it is to “forsake their own 
mercy,” to “turn back into perdition.” 

So he begins with a reminder of the incapacity 
of the Law to save, by pointing to the ceaseless 
repetition of the sacrificial acts. Year by year, 
on one Atonement Day after another, the blood- 


CONSCIENCE OF SINS 53 


shedding, the blood-sprinkling, the propitiation, 
had to be done again. Year by year accordingly 
the worshippers were treated as “not perfect” 
(ver. 1); that is to say, in the clear light of 
the context, they were not perfect as to recon- 
ciliation, they were loaded still with the burthen 
of guilt. The “conscience of sins” (ver. 2) 
haunted them still, that is to say, the weary 
sense of an unsettled score of offences, a posi- 
tion precarious and unassured before the Judge. 
We believe—nay, with the Psalms in our 
hands, such Psalms as xxiii, and xxxii., and 
cill., we know—that for the really contrite and 
loyal heart, even under the Law, there were 
large experiences of peace and joy. But these 
blessings were not due to the sacrifices of the 
tabernacle or the temple, however divinely 
ordered. They were due to revelations from 
many quarters of the character of the Lord 
Jehovah, and not least, assuredly, to the con- 
viction—how could the more deeply taught 
souls have helped it?—that this vast and 
death-dealing ceremonial had a goal which alone 
could explain it, in some transcendent climax of 
remission. But in itself the ritual emphasized 
not gladness but judgment, not love but the 
dread fact of guilt. And the blood of goats 
could not for a moment be thought of (ver. 4) 
as by self able to make peace with God. At 


~ 2 re oe eb 
‘ ht Late. 
Tiron 


54 FULL, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT 


best it laid stress on the need of something 
which, while analogous to it on one side, should 
be transcendently different and greater on the 
other. 

The priests daily (ver. 11), the high priest 
yearly, as they slew and burnt the victims, and 
sprinkled blood, and wafted incense, in view of 
Israel’s tale of offences against his King, were 
all, by their every action, prophets of that 
mysterious something yet to come. They 
“made remembrance of sins” (ver. 3), writing 
always anew upon the conscience of the 
worshipper the certainty that sin, in its form 
of guilt, is a tremendous reality in the court 
of God, that it calls importunately for propitia- 
tion, while yet animal propitiations can never, 
by their very nature, be really propitiatory of 
themselves. Yet the God of Israel had com- 
manded them; they could not be mere forms 
therefore. What could they be then but types 
and suggestions of a reality which should at 
last justify the symbolism by a victorious fulfil- 
ment? Thus was an oracle like Isa. liii. made 
possible. And thus, as we are taught expressly 
here (verses 5—7), the oracle of Psalm xl. was 
made possible, in which “ sacrifices and offerings,” 
though prescribed to Israel by his King, were 
not “delighted in” by Him, not “willed” by 
Him for their own sake at all, but in which 


THE TYPES FULFILLED 55 


One speaks to the Eternal about another and 
supreme immolation, for which He who speaks 
“has come” to present HIMSELF. “Ears hast 
Thou opened for me,” runs the Hebrew (Ps. xl. 6). 
“A body hast Thou adjusted for me,” was the 
Greek paraphrase of the Seventy, followed 
by the holy Writer here. It was as if the 
paraphrasts, looking onward to the Hope of 
Israel, would interpret and expand the thought 
of an uttermost obedience, signified by the ear, 
into the completer thought of the body of 
which the listening ear was part, and which 
should be given up wholly im sacrifice to 
God.* 

If this is at all the course of the Writer’s ex- 
position, there is nothing arbitrary in the sequel 
to it. He explains the enigmatic Psalm by 
finding in it the crucified and _self-offering 
High Priest of our profession. Of Him “the 
roll of the book” had spoken, as the supreme 
doer and bearer for us of the will of God. 
His sacred Body was the Thing indicated by 
the prophetic altars of Aaron. When He 
“offered” it, presenting it to the eternal 
Holiness on our behalf, when He let it be 
done to death because we had sinned, so that 
we might be accepted because it, because He, 
had suffered—then did He “fill” the types 

* So Kay, on this passage, in the Speaker's Commentary. 


Gene 
‘. a 


56 FULL, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT 


“full” of their true meaning, and so close 
their work for ever. 

Yes, that work was now for ever closed by 
the attainment of its goal. Moreover, His work 
of sacrifice and of offering, of suffering and of 
presentation, was for ever finished also. This 
is the burthen and message of the whole passage 
(verses 11-18). “Once for all” (édza€), 
“once for ever,” the holy Body has been offered 
(ver. 10). ° “He offered one sacrifice for sins in 
perpetuity,” eis 7o Sunvexés (ver. 12). And 
therefore, not only for the priests of the old 
rite but for the High Priest of the heavenly 
order, “there is no more offering for sin” 
(ver. 18). 

And why? Because, for the new Israel, for 
the chosen people of faith (ver. 39), the supreme 
sacrifice and offering has done its work. It has 
“sanctified” them (verses 10, 29); that is to 
say, it has hallowed them into God’s accepted 
possession by its reconciling and redeeming 
efficacy. For its virtue does much more than 
rescue; it annexes and appropriates what it 
saves. It has “perfected” them (ver. 14); that 
is to say, it has placed them effectually in that 
position of complete “peace with God” which 
guilt while still unsettled makes impossible. It 
has “put them among the children,” within the 
home circle of Divine love. It has done this “in 


PEACE UPON ISRAEL 57 


perpetuity,” efs 7d Sunvexés (ver. 14); that is to 
say, they will never to the very last need any- 
thing but that sacrifice and offering to be the 
cause and the warrant of their place within that 
home. “Their sins and their iniquities” their 
reconciled Father “will never remember any 
more” against them (ver. 17), in the sense that 
the sacrifice once presented on their behalf will 
be before Him every moment in the person of 
the Self-Sacrificer, who sits beside Him, “ appear- 
ing for us.” They are the Israel of the great 
New Covenant. And that covenant, as we have 
already remembered (viii. 7-13), provides for 
the spiritual transformation of the wills of the 
covenanters; the law of their God shall be 
“written on” their very minds; that is to say, 
they shall will His will as their own. But such 
a “writing” demands, by the very nature of 
things, that jirst, not last, there should be an 
absolute remission. For without remission there 
could not be inward peace, nor therefore filial 
and paternal harmony. So, for this deep mass 
of reasons, the new Israelites are jirst wholly 
accepted for the sake of their self-offered High 
Priest, that then they may be wholly transformed 
by His power, working through His peace, within 
themselves. 

The great closing paragraphs of the chapter 
(verses 19-39) are one long application of this 


TSR Ey ee 


58 FULL, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT 


sublime finality of the one Offering and this pre- 
sentness of our complete acceptance. First, the 
new Israelite, his “heart sprinkled from an evil 
conscience ” (ver. 22), released, that is to say, by 
the applied Sacrifice from the haunting sense of 
guilt, and having his “body washed with pure 
water,’ the baptismal sign and seal of the 
covenant blessing, is to behave as what he 1s— 
the child at home. That home is the Holy 
Place; it is the very Presence of his God; but 
itis home. Heis to pass into-that sanctuary, 
along the pathway traced by the blessed blood, 
not hesitating, but with the “boldness” of an 
absolute reliance, perfectly free while perfectly 
and wonderingly humbled; “with a true heart, 
in fulness, in full assurance, of faith” (ver. 22). 
He is to hold fast his avowal of assurance, and 
meanwhile he is to animate the brethren round 
him to a holy rivalry (ver. 24) of love and 
zeal. He is to maintain all possible worshipping 
union with them, in the dawning light of the 
promised return of the now enthroned High 
Priest (ver. 25). 

Then, further, the new Israelite is to cherish 
the grace of godly fear. The “boldness” of the 
loyal child is to go along with the clear recollec- 
tion that outside the holy home there lies only 
“a wilderness of woe.” To leave it, to turn back 
from it, to be a renegade from covenant joys, 


MEMORY AND HOPE 59 


is no mere exchange of the best for the less 
good. It means multiplied and capital rebellion. 
No legal shadow-sacrifices will shelter now the 
soul that forsakes the eternal High Priest and 
casts His Self-Sacrifice aside. To do that is to 
set out towards a hopeless retribution, towards 
the fire of judgment, the vengeance of the living 
God (verses 26-31). 

With tender urgency he pleads for fresh 
memories and fresh resolves (verses 32-35). 
He recalls to them days, not long ago, when 
they had borne shame and loss, “a conflict of 
sufferings,” fellowship with outcast and im- 
prisoned saints, spoiling of their own possessions 
—all made more than bearable by the joy of 
their wonderful “ enlightenment” (ver. 32), Let 
them do so still, in full view of the coming 
crown. Let them grasp afresh the glorious 
privilege of “boldness” (ver. 35), reaffirming to 
themselves with strong assurance that they are 
“sanctified,” “perfected,” at home with God in 
Christ. Let them rise up and go on in that 
noble “patience” (ver. 36) which “suffers and 
is strong.” It is only “a very little while” 
before the High Priest will reappear. And the 
“faith” which takes Him at His word will, as 
the prophet witnesses (Hab. 11. 4), bridge that 
little while with a “life” which cannot die. To 
“shrink back,” as the same seer in the same 


60 FULL, PERFECT, AND SUFFICIENT 


breath warns us, is to lose the smile of God in 
a final ruin. But that, for us, cannot be; we, 
in His mercy, relying upon the faithful Promiser, 
attain “the saving of the soul.” 

Now, as then, the tenth chapter of the Hebrews 
points with a golden rod to the one path of life, and 
peace, and perseverance to the end. “ Rejoice in 
the Lord; for you it is safe” (Phil. iii. 1). The 
“boldness” of a humble assurance of a present 
and a great salvation traces the way for us, as 
it traced the way of old, through holiness to 
Heaven. 


CHAPTER VIII 


FAITH AND ITS POWER 


Hes. xi. (I.) 


HE eleventh chapter of the Hebrews is a 
pre-eminent Scripture. With the fullest 
recognition of the Divine greatness of the whole 
Bible, never forgetting that “every scripture 
hath in it the Spirit of God” (2 Tim. ii. 16), 
we are yet aware as we read that some volumes 
in the inspired Library are more pregnant than 
others, some structures in the sacred city of the 
Bible more impressive than others, more rich in 
interest, more responsive to repeated visits. Such 
a scripture among books is this Epistle, and 
such a scripture among chapters is that on 
which we enter now. 

It is impressive by the majestic singleness of 
its theme; Faith, from first to last, is its matter 
and its burthen. Further, it carries one long 
appeal to the heart by its method; almost from 
the exordium to the very close it deals with its 
theme not by abstract reasoning, nor even by a 

éi 





62 FAITH AND ITS POWER 


citation of inspired utterances only. It works 
out its message by a display, in long and living 
_ procession, of imspired human experiences. It 
is to an extraordinary degree human, dealing 
all along with names as familiar to us as any 
in any history can be; with characters which 
are perfectly individual; with lives lived in the 
face of difficulty, danger, trial, sorrow, as concrete 
as possible ; with deaths met and overcome under 
conditions of mystery, suspense, trial to courage 
and to trust, which for all time the heart of man 
can apprehend in their solemnity. Meanwhile, 
as a matter of diction and eloquence, the chapter 
carries in it that peculiar charm which comes 
always with a stately enumeration. It has often 
been remarked that there is a spell in the mere 
recitation of names by a master of verse: 


\ 
‘ine ‘*Lancelot, and Pelleas, and Pellenore.” 


Or take that great scene in Marmion, where 
the spectral summons is pealed from Edinburgh 
Cross : 
‘*Then thunder’d forth a roll of names; 
The first was thine, unhappy James! 
Then all thy nobles came ; 
Crawford, Glencairn, Montrose, Argyle, 
Ross, Bothwell, Forbes, Lennox, Lyle, 
Each chief of birth and fame.” 


And the consummate prose of this our chapter 
moves us with the like rhythmical power upon 


A GREAT SCRIPTURE 63 


the spirit, while from Abel and Enoch onwards 
we hear recited, name by name, the ancestors of 
the undying family of faith. No wonder that 
the chapter should have inspired to utterances 
formed in its own style the Christian eloquence 
of later days, as in that noble closing passage 
of Julius Hare’s Victory of Faith, where he carries 
on the record through the apostolic age, and the 
early persecutions, and the times of the Fathers, 
to Wilfrid and Bernard, the Waldenses, Wiclif, 
Luther, Latimer, down to Oberlin, and Simeon, 
“and Howard, and Neff, and Henry Martyn.” 

So we approach the chapter, familiar as it is 
(and it is so familiar because it is so great), with 
a peculiar and reverent expectation. We look 
forward to another visit to this great gallery of 
“the portraits of the family of God” with a 
pleasure as natural as it is reverent and believ- 
ing. ‘True to our plan in these expositions, 
however, we shall not attempt to comment 
upon it in the least degree fully or in detail. 
Our aim will be rather to collect and focus 
together some main elements of its teaching, 
particularly in regard of their applicability to 
our own days. 

The first question suggested as we read is, 

——what is the connexion of the chapter? Why 
does the Writer spend all this wealth of example 
and application upon the one word Faith ? 


\ A 


64 FAITH AND ITS POWER 


The reason is not far to seek. The tenth 
chapter closes with that word, or rather with 
that truth: “My righteous man shall live by 
faith”; “we are of them that have faith, unto 
the saving of the soul.” And this close is only 
the issue of a strain of previous teachings, going 
far back towards the opening of the Epistle. 
“The evil heart of unbelief,’ of “ unfaith,” if the 
word may be used, is the theme of warning in 
iii. 12: “They could not enter in because of 
unbelief” (iii 19). “The word of hearing did 
not profit them” because of their lack of faith 
(iv. 2). It is “we who have believed” who 
“enter into God’s rest” (iv. 3). Looking to our 
great High Priest and His finished work, we are 
to “draw near with a true heart, in fulness of 
faith” (x. 22), for the all-sufficient reason that 
such trust meets and appropriates eternal truth: 
“He is faithful that promised” (x. 23). 

These explicit occasional mentions of faith are, 
however, as we might expect, only a part of the 
phenomenon of the great place which the idea of 
faith holds in the Epistle. When we come to 
reflect upon it, the precise position of the Hebrew 
Christians was that of men seriously, even tre- 
mendously, tempted to walk by sight, not by faith. 
The Gospel called them to venture their all, for 
time and eternity, upon an invisible Person, an in- 
visible order, a mediation carried on above the 


THE HEBREWS’ TRIAL OF FAITH 65 


skies, a presentation of sacrifice made in a temple 
infinitely other than that of Mount Moriah, and 
a kingdom which, as to all outward appearance, 
belonged to a future quite isolated from the 
present. On the other hand, so they were told 
by their friends, and so it was perfectly natural 
to them to think, the vast visible institutions of 
the Law were the very truth of God for their 
salvation, and those institutions appealed to them 
through every sense. Why should they forsake 
a creed which unquestionably connected itself 
with Divine action and revelation in the past, 
and which presented itself actually to them 
under the embodiment of a widespread but 
coherent nation, all descended from Abraham 
and Israel, and of a glorious “ city of solemnities,” 
and of a temple which was itself a wonder of 
the world, and of which every detail was 
“according to a pattern” of Divine purpose, 
and in which all the worship, all the ritual, 
done at the altars and within the veil, was great 
with the majesty of Divine prescription? There 
the pious Israelite could behold one vast sacra- 
mental symbol of JEHovAH’s life, glory, and 
faithfulness. And the living priesthood that 
ministered there, in all its courses and orders, 
was one large, accessible organ of personal 
witness to the blessings assured to the faithful 
“child of the Law.” 


5 


bia 


66 FAITH AND ITS POWER 


It demands an effort—and it well deserves an 
effort—to realize in some measure what the 
trial must have been for the sensitive mind of 
many a Jewish convert to look thus from the 
Gospel to the Law as both shewed themselves to 
him then. Even now the earnest and religious 
Jew, invited to accept the faith of Jesus, has his 
tremendous difficulties of thought, as we well 
know, although for so many ages Jerusalem has 
been “trodden down,” and the priesthood and 
sacrifices have become very ancient history. 
But when our Epistle was written it was far 
otherwise. True, the great ruin of the old order 
was very near at hand, but not to the common 
eye and mind. It may be—for all things are 
possible—that the Papal system may be near 
its period; but certainly there is little look of it 
to the traveller who visits Rome and contem- 
plates St. Peter’s and the Vatican. As little did 
the end of the Mosaic age present itself as 
probable, judging by externals, to the pilgrim to 
Jerusalem then, when, for example, the innumer- 
able hosts of Passover-keepers filled the whole 
environs of the city, and moved incessantly 
through the vast courts around the sacred space 
where the great altar sent up its smoke morning 
and evening, and where the wonderful House 
stood intact, “a mountain of snow pinnacled 
with gold.” 


A CONTRAST OF CLAIMS 67 


Think of the contrast between such historic 
invitations to “walk by sight” towards the 
bosom of Abraham, and the call to “come out 
and be separate” in some Christian upper-room, 
devoid of every semblance of decorative art and 
dignified proportion, only to listen to the Word, 
to pray and praise in the name of the Crucified, 


and to eat and drink at the simple Eucharist, \ 
the rite of Thanksgiving for—the Master's | 


awful death! 


Recollecting these facts of the position, it is | 


no wonder that the Writer emphasizes the 
greatness and glory of faith, and that now he 
devotes this whole noble and extended chapter 
to illustrate that glory. 

We come thus to the opening words of the 
passage, and listen to him as he takes the 
word “faith” up, and sets it apart, to look 
afresh at its significance and to describe its 
potency, before he proceeds, with the tact 
and skill of sympathy, to illustrate his account 
of it from the history so deeply sacred to the 
tried Hebrew Christian’s heart. 

“ Now faith is the assurance of things hoped 
for, the proving of things not seen.” So the 
Revisers translate the first verse. They place in 
their margin, as an alternative, a rendering which 
makes faith to be “the giving substance to things 
hoped for, the test of things not seen.” I pre- 


\ 
| 





68 FAITH AND ITS POWER 


sume to think that the margin is preferable as 
a representation of the first clause in the Greek, 
and the text as a representation of the second. 
So I would render (with the one further variation, 
in view of the Greek, that I dispense with the 
definite article): “ Now faith is a giving of sub- 
stance to things hoped for, a demonstration of 
things not seen.” And we may paraphrase this 
rendering somewhat thus: “Faith is that by 
which the hoped-for becomes to us as if visible 
and tangible, and by which the’ unseen is taken 
and treated as proven in its verity.” * 

In the light of what we have recalled regard- 
ing the position of the first readers of the words, 
we have only to render them thus to see their 
perfect appropriateness, their adjustment to an 
“exceeding need.” The Gospel led its disciple 
supremely and ultimately always towards the 
hoped-for and the unseen. True, it had a 
reference of untold value and power to the seen 
and present. There was then, as there is in 


* A friend has pointed out to me that in the recently 
discovered papyri, which, although a relatively small part of 
them only has been read as yet, have thrown much deeply in- 
teresting light on the character and vocabulary of Greek as used 
by the New Testament writers, the word drécracis is found 
with the meaning of ‘‘title-deeds.” On the hypothesis of such 
a meaning here (we can only speak with reserve), we may 
paraphrase: ‘‘ Faith enables us to treat things hoped for as a 
property of which we hold the deeds.” 


THE GOSPEL ‘AND THIS LIFE 69 


our day, nothing like the Gospel to transfigure 
character, on the spot, here and now, and thus 
to transfigure the scene and the persons around 
the man, before his eyes, within reach of his 
hands, in the whole intercourse of his life, by 
giving them all a new and wonderful yet most 
practical importance through the Lord’s relation 
to them and to him. But it does this always 
and inevitably in the power and in the light of 
facts which are out of sight now, and of prospects 
essentially bound up with “the life of the world 
to come.” The most diligent and sensible 
worker in Christian philanthropy, 2f he is fully 
Christian in his idea and action, does what he 
does so well for the relief of the oppressed, or 
for the civilization of the degraded, because at 
the heart of his useful life he spiritually knows 
“ Him that is invisible,” and is animated by the 
thought that he works for beings capable, after 
this life’s discipline, of “ enjoying Him fully for 
ever.” He labours for. man, man on earth, 
because he loves God in heaven, and because he 
believes that God made man and redeemed man 
for an immortality to which time is only the short 
while all-important avenue. In the calmest 
and most normal Christian periods, accordingly, 
for the least perilous and heroic forms of faithful 
Christian service, it is vital to remember that 
attitude and action of the soul which we call 


a eee ee 
. ¥e . 


70 FAITH AND ITS POWER 


faith. For faith is essential both to the 
victories and the utilities of the Christian life, 
just so far as that life touches always at its 
living spring “things hoped for,” “things not 
seen.” And at a time like that of the first 
readers of the Epistle every such necessity was 
enhanced indefinitely, both by the perils and 
threatenings which they had to face and by the 
majestic illusion to which they were continually 
exposed—the illusion under which the order of 
the Law, because it was Divine in origin and 
magnificent in its visible embodiment, looked as 
if it must be the permanent, the final, phase of 
sacred truth and life on earth. 

In our next chapter we will consider both 
the account of faith here given and some main 
points in the illustration of it by examples. 


CHAPTER IX 


FAITH AND ITS ANNALS 


HEs. xi. (II.) 


E considered in the last chapter the account 
of Faith with which the apostolic Writer 
opens this great recital of the “life, work, and 
triumph of faith” in holy human lives. His words, 
as we found, lend themselves to some variety of 
explanation in detail: the term i7rdctaczs alone 
may be interpreted in at least three ways. But 
I do not think that this need disturb us as to 
the essential meaning of the description. Each 
and all of the renderings leave us with the thought 
that faith has a power in it to make the thing 
hoped-for act upon us as if it were attained, and 
the invisible as if it were before our eyes. 
We may pause so far further over the 
description of faith here as to point out that it 
is precisely this, a, description, not_a definition. 
To quote Heb. xi. 1 as a good definition of faith 
is to mistake its import altogether. I have 


often recalled, in speech or writing, a story told 
71 


72 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS 


me forty years ago by an Oxford friend when we 
were masters together at a public school, He 
had attended a Greek Testament lecture at his 
college a few years before, and the lecturer one 
day asked the class for a definition of faith. 
Some one quoted Heb. xi. 1, and the lecturer’s 
answer was, “ You could not have given a worse 
definition.” My old friend, a “broad” but most 
reverent Churchman, referred to this as an 
instance of painful flippancy. It may have 
been so. But I am prepared to think that the 
lecturer may not have meant it so at all. He 
may only have expressed rather crudely his view, 
the right view, to my mind, that we have here 
not a definition of faith at all but a description 
of faith as an operative force, an account of what 
faith looks like when it is at work; and this is 
a very different matter. 

What is a definition? A precise and ex- 
clusive statement of the essentials of a thing, such 
that it will fit no other thing. A description 
may be something altogether different from this. 
It may so handle the object that the terms are 
not exclusive at all, but are equally applicable 
to something else; as here for example, where 
the phraseology would equally well describe 
imagination in its more vivid forms—a thing as 
different as possible from faith. To be quite 
practical, we have here, if we read this first 


DESCRIPTION NOT DEFINITION 73 


verse in the light of the whole subsequent 
development of the chapter, a description of faith 
at work, of the potency and victories of faith, 
rather than a definition of faith in its distinctive 
essence. A true parallel to this passage is the 
familiar sentence, “ Knowledge is power.” Those 
words do not define knowledge, obviously ; to do 
that would demand a totally different phrase. 
What the words do is to give us one great 
resultant of knowledge; to tell us that the 
possession and use of knowledge endows the man 
who knows with a force and efficiency which he 
would lack without it. Few words are more 
elastic and adaptable than the verb sub- 
stantive. “Js” can denote a wide variety of 
ideas, from that of personal identity, as when I 
see that yonder distant figure 7s my brother; 
to that of equivalence, as when a stamped and 
signed piece of thin paper called a bank-note is 
five pounds of gold; or to that of mere repre- 
sentation, as when another piece of paper, or a 
sheet of canvas, duly lined and coloured by the 
artist to show the semblance of a human face, 7s 
the King, or is my father; or to that of result 
and effect, as when we say that knowledge 1s 
power, or that seeing 7s believing.* 


* It is obvious that these elementary reflections have every- 
thing to do with the need of caution in explaining those most 
sacred words, ‘‘ This 7s my body which is given for you.” 


74 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS 


Here we have precisely that last application 
of the verb substantive, only in an exact and 
most noble antithesis. “Seeing is believing,” 


says the familiar proverb. “Believing is seeing,” 


es 


says the Divine word here. That is to say, 
when the human soul so relies upon God that 
His word is absolute and sufficient for its 
certainties, this reliance, this faith, has in it 
the potency of sight. It is as sure of the 
promised blessing as if it were a present 
possession. It is as ready to act upon “the 
things not seen as yet,” the laws, powers, hopes 
beyond the veil, as if all was in open view 
to the eyes of the body. 

The whole course of the chapter, when it 
comes down to particulars and persons, bears 
this out. From first to last the message carried 
to us by the lives and actions of the faithful is 
this, that they took their Lord at His word, 
simply as His word, and in the power of that 
reliance found themselves able to act as if the 
unseen were seen and the hoped-for were present. 
“The elders” (ver. 2) are in view from the first 
—that is to say, the pre-Christian saints, who 
were in that sense distinctively men who proved 
the power of faith, that they all lived and died 
before the visible fulfilment of the great promise 


‘of salvation. To them, to be sure, or rather to 


many of them, not to all, merciful helps were 


THE ELDERS 75 


granted. The unseen and the hoped-for was 
sometimes, not always, made more tangible to 
them by the grant of some sign and token, some 
portent or miracle, by the way. But the careful 
Bible-reader knows how very little such things 
are represented in the holy histories as being 
the “ daily bread ” of the life of the old believers. 
Even in the lives where they occur most often 
they come at long and difficult intervals, and 
in some lives not at all, or hardly at all. And 
assuredly we gather here that, to the mind of 
the apostolic Writer, no experience of miracles, 
no permission even to hold direct colloquy with 
the Eternal, ever made up for that immeasurable 
“aid to faith” which we enjoy who know the 
Incarnate Son as fact, and walk on an earth 
which has seen the God-Man traverse it, and 
die upon it, and rise again. 

These “elders” were men called to live, in 
an eminent and most trying degree, not by 
sight but by faith, by mere reliance upon a 
Promiser. Therefore their living witness to 
the capacity of faith to make the unseen visible 
and the hoped-for present is the more precious 
to us. We, with the Christ of God manifested 
to us, displayed in history, experienced in the 
heart—what are not we to find the power of 
faith to be in our lives, having, for our supreme 
seal upon faith, the promise fulfilled, the Image 


76 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS 


of the Invisible God, made one with our nature 


and dwelling in our hearts ? 

One partial exception, and only one, to this 
great ruling lesson of the chapter is to be 
noted; it occurs in the second verse. There 
“by faith we perceive that the worlds,” the 
cons, the, dispensations and evolutions of created 
being, “have been framed,” perfected, adjusted 
to one another, “by the Word of God, so that 
not from things which appear has that which 
is seen originated.” These words appear to be 
inserted where they stand in order, so to speak, 
to carry the sequence of the references to the 
Old Testament down from its very first page. 
The work of faith has exercise in face of the 
mysterious narrative of Creation, and in this 
one instance the exercise is quoted as what 
concerns us now quite as much as “the elders.” 
They like us, we like them, get our guarantee 
as to the facts of the primal past not by sight 
but by faith, by taking God at His word. He, 
in His revelation, tells us that “in the be- 
ginning ””—the beginning of whatever existence 
is other than eternal—“God created.” Things 
finite, things visible, came into original being 
not as evolved from previous similar material, 
but as of His will. 

But when that pregnant side-word has once 
been said, the argument settles itself forthwith 


tan, 


THE ELDERS AND THEIR FAITH 77 


upon the recorded examples of the potency of 
faith as “the elders” exercised it. We see man 
after man enabled to treat the invisible as visible, 
the promised as present, by reliant rest upon the 
word of God, however conveyed. To Abel, we 
know not how, it was divinely said that the 
sacrificed “ firstling” was the acceptable offering, 
and, antecedent to any possible experience, he 
offered it. To Enoch, we know not how, it 
was made known that the Eternal, as invisible 
to him as to us, cared for man’s worshipping 
company, and he addressed himself through his 
age-long life to “walk with God.” Noah was 
apprised, for the first time in man’s known 
history, of an approaching cataclysm and of the 
way of escape; the promise came to him wrapped 
in the cloud of an awful warning, and it was 
long delayed, but he acted upon it in the steady 
energy of faith. Abraham was “called,” we know 
not precisely how, but in some way which tested 
his reliance on things “not seen as yet,’ and he 
set out on that wonderful life of a hundred 
years of faith. He renounced the settled habits 
and old civilization of Chaldea for the new life 
of a Syrian nomad, “settling permanently in 
tents” (€v oxnvais Katouxnoas), he and his son 
and his grandson after him, all in view of an 
invisible future made visible by the trusted 
promise, a future culminating at last to his “eye 


78 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS 


of faith,’ so here we are solemnly assured, in 
the city of the saints, in the Canaan of the 
heavens. The same reliance on the sheer word 
of promise nerved him to the awful ordeal of the 
all-but immolation of his son. And that son 
in his turn, against all appearances, and rather 
bowing to the Word of God than embracing it, 
blessed fis least-loved son above his dearest; 
and that son in his turn, and his son in his turn, 
carried the process on, treating the greatness of 
Ephraim and the deliverance from Egypt as 
things seen and present, because God had so 
spoken. The parents of Moses, and then Moses 
himself, in his strange life of disappointments 
and wonders, deal likewise with the future, the 
unseen, the seemingly impossible, on the warrant 
of a promise. Figures as little heroic in natural 
character as Sarah, as little noble in life as 
Rahab, take place in the long procession, as 
those who treat the invisible as visible by faith. 
So do the thronging “elders” of ver. 32—a 
group singularly diverse in everything but this 
victory over the seen and present by faith in 
the promise. So do the unnamed confessors and 
martyrs of the closing paragraph, the heart- 
broken, the tortured, the wanderers of the dens 
and caves, who all alike, amidst a thousand 
differences of condition and of character, “ ob- 
tained a good report through faith”; and all 


THE ELDERS AND THEIR FAITH 79 


won through faith that victory, so great when 
we reflect upon it—that they died “not having 
received the promise.” They trusted to the very \ 
end. When they sank down in death upon 
their shadowy path of pilgrimage, “the promise,” 
the promised Christ, had not yet come. Never- 
theless they treated the hope of Him as fact, 
and they won their victory by faith. 

And now they are parts and members of the 
“great cloud” who watch us in our turn—us, 
with things unseen and hoped-for still in front, 
but with JESUS at our side. 





CHAPTER X 


FOLLOWERS OF THEM 


Hes, xii. 1-14 


HE Epistle approaches its close. The Writer 
has much yet to say to the disciples upon 
many things, all connected with that main 
interest of their lives, a resolute fidelity to the 
Lord, to the Gospel, and to one another. But 
he has not yet quite done with that side of their 
“exceeding need” to which the antidote is the 
faith which can deal with the future as the 
present, with the unseen as the seen. Upon 
this theme, from one aspect or another, is spent 
the passage now before us. 

First, the appeal is to the recollection that 
the combat, the race, the victory of faith, as it 
was for the Hebrew believers, “the contest set 
before us” (ver. 1), not only had been fought - 
and won before them by the saints of the old 
time, but that those saints were now, from 
their blessed rest, as “spirits of the just made 
perfect” (ver. 23), watchers and witnesses of 

80 


THE WITNESSES 81 


their successors’ course. “We have, lying 
around us, so great a cloud of witnesses” 
(ver. 1). “We” are running, like the com- 
petitors in the Hellenic stadium, in the public 
view of a mighty concourse, so vast, so aggre- 
gated, so placed aloft, that no word less great 
than “cloud” occurs as its designation: that 
“long cloud” as it is finely called in Isaac 
Watts’ noble hymn, “Give me the wings of 
faith.” True, the multitudinous watchers are 
unseen, but this only gives faith another 
opportunity of exercise; we are to treat the 
Blessed as seen, for we know that they are there, 
living to God, one with us, fellows of our life 
and love. So let us address ourselves afresh to 
the spiritual race, the course of faith. Let us, 
as athletes of the soul, strip all encumbrance 
off, “every weight” of allowed wrong, all guilty 
links with the world of rebellion and self-love ; 
“the sin which doth so easily beset us,” cling- 
ing so soon around the feet, like a net of fine 
but stubborn meshes, till the runner gives up 
the hopeless effort and is lost.* 

I thus explain the “witnesses” to mean 
‘spectators, watchers, not testifiers. The con- 


* IT cannot think possible the alternative (marginal) render- 
ing of evrepicrarov in the Revised Version— ‘‘admired by 
many.” There is example for the meaning in classical Greek, 
but the idea is totally out of keeping with the spirit of this 
passage. 


6 


a 


82 FOLLOWERS OF THEM 


text seems to me to decide somewhat positively 
for this explanation. It is an altogether 
pictorial context; the imagery of the foot-race 
comes suddenly up, and in a moment raises 
before us the vision of the stadium and its 
surroundings. The reader cannot see the course 
with his inner eyes without also seeing those 
hosts of eager lookers-on which made, on every 
such occasion, in the old world as now, the life 
of the hour. In such a context nothing but 
explicit and positive reasons to the contrary 
could give to the word “ witnesses,” and to the 
word “cloud” in connexion with it, any other 
allusion. True, these watchers are all, as a fact, 
evidential “witnesses” also, testifiers to the 
infinite benefit and success of the race of faith. 
But that thought lies almost hidden behind the 
other. It is as loving, sympathetic, inspiring 
lookers-on that the old saints, from Abel on- 
wards, are here seen gathered, thronging and 
intent, around us as we run. 

The conception runs off of course into 
mystery, as every possible conception about the 
unseen does, even when Scripture is most 
explicit about unseen facts. We ask, and ask 
in vain, what is the medium through which 
these observers watch us, the air and light, as it 
were, in which their vision acts; what is their 
proximity to us all the while; to what extent 


AN INSPIRING REVELATION 83 


they are able to know the entire conditions of 
our race. But all this leaves faith in peaceful 
possession of a fact of unspeakable animation. 
It tells the discouraged or tired Christian, 
tempted to think of the unseen as a dark 
void, that it is rather a bright and populous 
world, in mysterious touch and continuity with 
this, and that our forerunners, from those 
of the remotest past down to the last-called 
beloved one who has passed out of our 
sight, know enough about us to mark our 
advance and to prepare their welcome at the 
goal. 
In that rich treasury of sacred song, Hymns 
Jrom the Land of Luther, is included the trans- 
lation of a noble hymn by Simon Dach, O wie 
selig seid thr doch, thr Frommen, “O how happy 
are ye, saints forgiven.” That hymn beautifully 
illustrates this verse. It is written responsively 
all through. One stanza, sung upward, is the 
utterance from below of the pilgrim Church, 
longing for her rest. The next, sung from 
above, is the answer of the Blessed, telling of 
their love and sympathy, taught them by their 
own similar sufferings, of their bright foreview 
of the celestial crown reserved for their still 
toiling brethren. So the two choirs answer each 
other, turn by turn, till at last both join in a 
glorious concert of blended song, a closing strain 


* 


84 FOLLOWERS OF THEM 


of faith and praise. Let us listen often for 
those answers from above. 
But the holy Writer has more to say yet 
about the motives to faith, He points the 
weary saints upward, even beyond the “cloud,” 
to a Form radiant and supreme. They are to 
run, conscious of the witnesses, but yet more 
intently “looking off (dgop@vtes) unto JESUS, 
the supreme Leader (dpynyov) and Perfecter of 
faith”; that is to say, the Lord of the whole 
host of the believing, and Himself the consum- 
mate Worker in the field of faith, who, for a 
joy promised but not seen, “endured the Cross,” 
when its immediate aspect was an inexpressible 
outrage and disgrace; reaching the throne of 
all existence, as Son of Man, in spite of every 
possible appearance to the contrary (ver. 2). 
Yes, and not only was that final victory thus won 
by Him, but He arrived at it by a path full of 
the conflicts which threaten faith. He “endured 
the contradiction of sinners against Himself” 
(ver. 3). Year by year, day by day, from the 
Pharisee, from the worldling, from the leaders 
of religion, from the inconstant crowd, He had 
“ contradiction ” to endure—sometimes even from 
| “the men of His own household.” He was 
, challenged to prove His claims; He was insulted 
‘ over His assertion of them, or over His silence 

about them. In every way, at every turn, they 


THE SUPREME BELIEVER 85 


spoke against Him to His face, as He slowly 
advanced, through a life of love and suffering, to 
~ the Agony and the Crucifixion. 

Let us not think that all this put no strain, 
even in the King Messiah, upon faith. It may 
seem scarcely reverent (I° know devout and 
thoughtful Christians who have felt it to be 
so) to speak of our blessed Lord as exercising 
faith, as being the supreme Believer. But we 
need not shrink from the thought. It is no more 
irreverent, surely, than to accept the evidence 
of the Gospels to His perfect human capacity 
to be weary, to be surprised, to be specially 
moved to compassion by the sight of suffering. 
In His sinless conformity “in all things to His 
brethren” there was never for one moment 
room in Him—of this we may be amply sure 
—for error of thought or of word, as He acted 
as the supreme and absolute Prophet of His 
Church. But there was room, so we are ex- 
pressly told, on one tremendous occasion at 
least (Matt. xxvi. 37), for a mysterious “be- 
wilderment ” (adnuovetv) of His blessed human 
soul. Can we doubt that the victory won in 
the Garden, after which He went with profound 
calmness to the unjust priest, and Pilate, and 
the Cross, was of the nature of a victory of 
faith? Did He not then treat the coming “joy ” 
as a reality although, in so awful a sense and 


86 FOLLOWERS OF THEM 


measure He did not “feel” it then? The “ be- 
wilderment” did not drive Him back from our 
redemption ; and why? Because “He TRUSTED 
in Gop that He would deliver Him” (Ps. xxii. 9 ; 
Matt. xxvii. 42), whatever should be the con- 
tents of “the cup” from which His whole 
humanity turned away as almost impossible to 
drink. 

And may we not be sure that on many a 
previous occasion of minor and yet bitter trial, 
when evil men gathered round Him with cynical 
objections and ruthless denials of His claims, 
the victory was akin to the victory of Geth- 
semane? Often, surely, a strange “bewilder- 
ment” must have beset the Redeemer’s soul, of 
which the external token was the sigh, the 
groan, the tears, which shewed Him to be so 
truly Man. 

We all hold, in full doctrinal orthodoxy, that 
the Lord’s sufferings, both of soul and body, were 
no “docetic” semblance but a deep and infinitely 
pathetic reality. But we need at times to think 
somewhat deliberately in order to receive the 
full impression of that truth upon the heart. 
And then surely we are constrained to see in 
Him, who thus really suffered and really “en- 
dured,” the supreme Exemplar of the victory 
of faith, the perfect Sympathizer with the tried 
believer. 


WHEN COMES THE EVIL DAY 87 


From this pregnant thought, of the faith 
exercised by JEsus, the disciple is directly led 
in the remainder of our passage to the practical 
inferences for himself. The days, for those first 
readers of the Epistle, were indeed evil. Though 
not yet called to martyrdom (ver. 4), they were 
hard beset, not only by importunate reasonings 
and appeals which, as we have seen all along, 
were straining their spiritual allegiance, but by 
actual outrages (see eg. x. 34), by the “scourg- 
ing” (ver. 6) of bitter social persecution. Well, 
“looking off unto” Him who had so greatly 
endured, they were, in these things also, to see 
the unseen and to presentiate the future. From 
the Proverbs (iii. 11, 12), that book where the 
apostolic insight so often finds the purest 
spiritual messages,* he quotes (verses 5, 6) the 
tender words which bid the chastened child see 
in his chastening the assurance (ver. 8) of his 
happy, holy sonship in the home of a Father, 
“the Father of our spirits,’ who, unlike our 
earthly fathers even at their best (and that 
was a noble best indeed), not only chastens, but 
chastens with an unerring result of holiness in 
the submissive child—yea, a holiness which is 
one with His own (ver. 10), His Spirit in our 
wills. 


'*It was evidently a book dear to St. Peter’s mind, as his 
First Epistle shews. 


—_—_— 


Ay ee ae 


83 FOLLOWERS OF THEM 


Beautiful is the sympathy of this appeal to 
live, by faith, the life of victorious patience. 
“ All chastening, for the present, seems not to 
belong to joy but grief” (ver. 11). Yes, the 
immediate pain is here fully recognized, not 
ignored. It ismot spoken of as if, in view of its 
sequel, it did not matter. “It belongs to grief.” 
Scripture is full of this tender insight into the 
bitterness of even our salutary sorrows, and its 
appeals to patience are all the more potent for 
that insight. .“ Nevertheless, afterward, it pro- 
duces the peace-bringing fruit of righteousness,” 
the sense of a profound inward rest, found in 
conformity to the “sweet, beloved will of God,” 
in living correspondence to the Father’s rule, 
“for those who have been exercised, as in a 
spiritual gymnasium (yeyupvacpévors), thereby.” 
That “exercise” was to tell at once, as they 
surrendered their wills to it in faith, in a present 
sense of the certainty of future blessing. “Brace 
the slack hands” to toil, “and the unstrung 
knees” to march (ver. 12), “and make straight 
paths for your feet,’ using your will, faith- 
strengthened, to choose the line of the will of 
God, and that alone. So should “the lame 
thing” be“ healed” rather than “turned aside.” 
The walk, feeble and halting always when the 
will is divided, should be restored to firmness 
and certainty again. 


AFTERWARD 89 


“Nevertheless, afterward.” That is the 
watchword of the whole pregnant passage. 
Nature, shortsighted and impatient, can deal 
with the seen and the present only. Grace, 
in its victorious form of patient faith, already 
takes hold upon the “afterward,” and works on, 
and walks on, “as seeing Him that is invisible.” 

With the thought of the witness-cloud around 
us, and “looking off” to the Prince of Faith, 
ascended, yet present with us, and sure of the 
ultimate and eternal “fruit of righteousness ” 
which lies hidden in the chastening of the 
Father of our spirits—we too will live by faith, 
taking God at His word, and saying Amen to 
His will, even to the end. 


CHAPTER XI 


SINAI AND SION 


Hes, xii. 14-28 


HE paragraph before us is largely concerned 
with the inner life of the believing com- 
munity, its cohesion member with member, and 
the call to each member and to all to “walk 
warily in dangerous days,” in the path of evan- 
gelical holiness. The Writer lays it upon them 
(ver. 14) to “pursue peace with all,” such peace 
as always tends, even in bad times, to reward 
the “sons of peace,” while they so behave 
themselves as never on their own part to con- 
tribute a factor to avoidable strife, and while the 
influence of their meek consistency leavens in 
some measure the mass around them. With 
equal and concurrent care they are to “pursue 
sanctification.” It is to be their strong ambition 
to develope and deepen incessantly that dedica- 
tion of themselves to the Holy One which will 
give them at once the standard and the secret 


of holiness, by bringing them into immediate 
go 


WARNINGS gI 


contact with Him who is at once their law and 
their life. They are to “live out,” in the spirit 
of a resolute quest after fuller and yet fuller 
attainment, the fact that He has redeemed them 
to be “a people of His own possession”; re- 
membering, with a solemn simplicity of con- 
viction, that only “the pure in heart” shall 
ever be able to “see God.” For the spirit 
which refuses to come into a_ surrendered 
harmony with His Spirit might be set in the 
midst of heaven itself, yet it would be blind, it 
would be blinded—by that alien glory. They are 
to keep watch and oversight upon one another 
(ver. 15), mutually observant all round, to see 
that the life of faith and love is alive indeed. 
Does any one find his fellow-believer “falling 
short of the grace of God,” sinking into conduct 
no better than the world’s? This must at once 
disquiet the observer, and call out his loving 
warnings, or at least his anxious intercessions ; 
for the declining convert inevitably extends an 
influence of decline around him, and the issue 
will be, in the end, a declining Church. Is “any 
root of bitterness growing up”? Is there (see 
Deut. xxix. 18) any Christian in the company 
so fallen, so “embittered” by alienation from his 
Lord, as to be a cause around him of “ defile- 
ment,” so as to stain ultimately large circles 
(o¢ 7rodXot) with the deep pollution of a practical 


92 SINAI AND SION 


apostasy from holiness? Is there here and there 
a personal example of spiritual infidelity (aropves) 
to the Lord, of that radically “ secular ” (Bé8mXos) 
spirit (ver. 16) of which Esau is the type, to 
which some “mess of meat,” some material ad- 
vantage, proves overwhelmingly more momentous 
than the unworldly “birthright” given by the 
promise of God? Let them all watch as for 
their life against such symptoms. It is a matter 
of eternal import. The ancient Esau found too 
late that he was an outcast, irrevocably, from the 
great blessing, though then he cried for it with 
a cry great and bitter. In vain he asked his 
father to reverse the destiny; there was no 

“place of repentance” in Isaac’s will, for Isaac 
knew that he had but carried out, blind as he 

~—-was, the will of God. 

Then follows (verses 18-24) that sublime 
antithesis of Sinai and Sion which forms one of 
the greatest examples of rhythmical, of almost 
lyrical, eloquence in the whole New Testament. 
On the one hand looms on the view the Thing,* 
material, tangible (WnAagdwpévw), all on fire, 
black with tempestuous cloud, its echoes pealing 
(ver. 19) to a tremendous trumpet-blast and then 
to a yet more awful “voice of words.” At its 


sachets ——= $$. 


* The word dpe: is certainly absent from the true text. We 
are left as in presence of a mysterious somewhat, a mighty mass, 
mantled in terror and without form or name. 


THE TWO MOUNTAINS 93 


base cowers an awe-struck, horror-struck, host of 
men, shuddering at the warning (ver. 20) not to 
touch the fatal rocks, crowding for refuge round 
a leader who himself owns (ver. 21) to heart- 
shaking fears.* On the other hand, as the eyes 
of faith are lifted, there shines into view, and in 
the closest spiritual proximity (for the believing 
company has actually “come unto it,’ ver. 22), 
the hill eternal, the true Mount Sion, where 
shines the city of the living God, the Jerusalem 
of heaven. No barren rocks are there, nor do 
menaces of articulate thunder sound from and 
around that height. All is light, and all is life. 
Yes, above all things all is life. Behold the 
countless thousands (uvpsdouwv) of radiant deni- 
zens, the angelic friends of man; and then beati- 
fied men besides (ver. 23), “festal assembly and 
church of the first-born, enrolled in heaven”; 
the Blessed gone before, the “great cloud,” seen 
now in their other character, as the triumphant 
throng of a celestial Passover, or of a Tabernacle- 
feast of palms, kept in the better Canaan to 
commemorate the mercies of the mortal wilder- 
ness. And there, centre and sun of the 
wonderful scene, is the glory of the “Judge of 
all,” Vindicator (so we read the meaning of the 
word «puTns here) of His afflicted ones, treading 


* A traditional utterance must be referred to, But the 
whole narrative in Exodus and in Deuteronomy supports it, 


904 SINAI AND SION 


down their enemies and presiding in majesty 
over their happy estate. Around Him rest and 
rejoice the pure “spirits of the just made 
perfect,” the dear and holy who have lately 
passed through death, “ perfected” already, even 
before their resurrection, in respect of the course 
finished, the fight fought, the faith kept, the 
trial for ever over. Lastly (ver. 24), the form 
is seen of the more than Moses of this better 
Mount of God. Behold the Mediator, not of the 
old covenant but of the new, the Covenant of 
the Eternal Spirit. Behold the Surety of the 
promise of the purified heart, the promise sealed 
with that sprinkled blood of the Incarnate 
Lamb which, in Divine antithesis to the call 
for vengeance on the fratricide which went up 
from Abel’s death, claims for the “ brethren” who 
once slew their Deliverer not remission only but 
holiness and heaven. 

It is a wonderful picture, the hill of the awful 
Law confronted by the “hill whence cometh our 
help.” And we ask ourselves why, just here in 
the Epistle, it is painted for us and left upon 
our spirit’s eyes for ever. Surely it is that the 
Hebrew disciple (and we in our turn to-day) 
may be quickened in watching and in walk- 
ing alike by an immense encouragement and a 
warning of corresponding power. The call has 
just been made, all through the twelfth chapter 


BETWEEN SINAI AND SION 95 


up to this point, to endure, to watch, to warn 
each other, to pursue to the uttermost the 
ambition of holiness. Let this be done as by 
those whose pilgrim tents are pitched as it were 
in a valley between those two mountains of God. 
Let the true Israelite turn his eyes sometimes 
upon Sinai, to learn again from its shadows and 
its thunders the infinite importance of the eternal 
Will, the awfulness of transgression, the terrors 
of the Law when its demand is met only by the 
miserable failures of the sinner. Then, humbled 
lower than the dust, let him turn towards the 
eternal Sion, and not only turn towards it but 
recollect that in the Spirit, and in the Son, he 
has “come unto it.” In the Lord Christ, his 
better Moses, his saving Mediator, he has already 
arrived beside it and rests upon it. No voice 
of thunder bids him not to touch it “lest he be 
thrust through.” He is commanded to come as 
near to it as it is possible to be, because he is to 
come to “the Lord of the Hill” Himself, in the 
absolute proximity of faith, love, and life. He 
is welcomed to its recesses, and to its heights. 
The first-born are his brethren; the just made 
perfect are his own beloved; every angel of all 
the host is his friend; the supreme Judge is his 
omnipotent Protector; Jesus is his Peace, through 
the blood of His Cross. “Blest inhabitant of 
Sion, washed in the Redeemer’s blood!” Shall he 





96 SINAI AND SION 


not address himself to the path and pursuit 
of holiness with a heart beating with an inex- 
haustible hope, and with a life present while 
eternal ? 

Then, as the great paragraph approaches its 
climax, the note of warning sounds again 
(ver. 25). The convert, fresh from the reminder 
of the “voice” of the sprinkled blood of the 
better covenant, is cautioned not to “ refuse” it, 
not to “decline” it (1) wapaurnonoe). The 
primary reference is manifestly to that perpetual 
danger of the Hebrews, the temptation to turn 
back from the Gospel, with its spiritual order and 
its hopes of things not yet seen, to the outworn 
Dispensation, with its externally majestic cireum- 
stances of glorious ritual and imposing shows of 
polity and power. They would need again and 
again to open the soul’s ears and eyes, and stead- 
fastly to recollect, against all appearances, that we ~ 
“are come unto the Mount Sion,” if they were to 
resist the magnetic forces which drew them back 
towards Sinai—and towards death. So they were 
to hear the sweet voices of heavenly love, and 
festal life, and blood-bought covenanted peace, 
sounding from the true Sion, with joy indeed but 
also with holy dread. They were to fear lest 
they should “decline” them, lest sense should 
conquer faith and the soul be lost under the 
mountain of condemnation after all. “For if 


WARNING AND PROMISE 97 


they did not escape who on earth declined Him 
who spoke oraculous warning (ypnpatifovra), 
much more shall we not escape, turning from 
Him who warns from heaven” (ver. 25). The 
contemner of the ban of Sinai fell “stricken 
through” the body. The “decliner” of the 
admonition to turn no more to the hill of doom, 
but boldly to climb the hill of peace, will fall 
stricken through the soul. That warning voice, 
which once shook the desert, has now promised 
(ver. 26)—for a promise, the promise of an 
eternal redemption, lies deep in that threatening 
(Hag. ii. 6)—that not earth only but heaven is 
yet to feel His shaking, and once for ever when 
it comes. He, “yet once more,” shall work one 
vast “ removing”; and then (ver. 27) a stability 
irremovable shall finally come in. “The things 
that have been made,” the terrestrial and 
material “figures of the real” (ix. 24), are to 
pass away, never to return, in order that “the 
things incapable of disturbance” (Ta yu cadevo- 
peva) “may remain.” And what are these 
things? Nothing less than the spiritual, ulti- 
mate, all-fulfilling truths and glories to which the 
“things made” served as preparation, type, and 
foil, but which themselves to all eternity shall 
know no successors, no “new order” through 
which God shall otherwise “fulfil Himself.” For 
what are they, in their inmost essence? They 


7 


98 SINAI AND SION 


are the truths which spring always from the 
Incarnate Son, and return always into Him; 
“the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, with 
eternal glory.” 

So let the disciples clasp their sublime 
privileges, and greatly rejoice — and also 
greatly fear to “decline” them, to surrender 
them, to treat them lightly. They “are in 
receipt (mapadayBdvovtes) of a kingdom un- 
shakable,” for they have become the willing 
vassals of the eternal David of the true Israel, in 
whose kingship they too are kings, reigning over 
“all the power of the enemy.” But, for the 
very reason that they hold a royalty, and such a 
royalty, let them address themselves to a life of 
adoration, and reverence, and awe, deep as that 
of -the holy ones who, close to the throne above, 
veil their faces and their feet evermore with 
their wings, not in terror but in a joy full of 
wonder and of worship. “Let us have grace,” 
let us take and use the grace which in the 
covenant is ours,* and in it let us live this life. 
For it is to be a life all the while not of alarm 
and doubting, but of grace. Only it is to be 
lived as before Him who is (ver. 29) “ consuming 
fire, a jealous God” (Deut. iv. 24), “jealous” 
against all “forsakers of their own mercy” 


* For this use of éywuev compare Rom. v. 1, where the best 
supported reading gives éxwmev elpyvny. 


TERROR VEILING LOVE 99 


(Jonah ii. 8), rejectors of His Son, even when 
they seem to fly for refuge to His Law. 

Thus the great concatenated passage concludes 
with one of the most formidable of Scripture 
utterances. But let us boldly gather peace and 
hope even from this word of fire. For what is 
the true message of the verses we have traversed, 
when we look back and sum them up? It is 
the glory, the fulness, the living richness, the 
abundant lovingkindness, the supreme and 
absolute finality, of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. It is our Lord Himself, the perfect 
and ultimate revelation of the grace and peace 
of God. And the fiery jealousy of the close, 
the warning that we shall lose our souls if we 
“ decline ” the blessed Son, what does it mean as 
to His Father’s heart? That He so loves the 
Son, and so loves us, that He adjures us by all 
His terrors as well as all His mercies never to 
turn for refuge for one hour away from the 
all-perfect Christ. 


CHAPTER XII 


APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS 


HE, xiii. 1-14 


HE last chapter of the Epistle has a character 
quite of its own. Unlike many of those 
often arbitrary divisions of the New Testament 
books which we know as chapters, it is a 
naturally separate section. The long and 
sustained arguments are over. The Writer's 
thoughts, gravitating to a close, and occupied 
naturally as they do so with the personal con- 
ditions of his Hebrew brethren, attach them- 
selves now to one now to another side of their 
duties, their difficulties, their more particular and 
detailed needs, practical and spiritual. As he 
touches upon these, sentence by sentence, we 
often see at a glance the probable occasion of the 
words, but often again we are left in the dark 
about it. Who shall say precisely why he 
insists (ver. 2) upon the exercise of hospitality ? 
or who were “the prisoners” (ver. 3) whom he 
bids them remember? Who shall tell what in 


roo 


RULES OF LOVE AND PURITY 1o1 


this particular community was the occasion for a 
solemn emphasis (ver. 4) upon the holiness of 
marriage, or why again, just for them, it was 
well to speak in warning (ver. 5) about the love 
of money and the temptation to discontent ? 
Nor can we be certain who were those departed 
“leaders,” “guides,” of ver. 7, whose “faith” the 
disciples were to “imitate,” whose blessed “ exit 
from their walk of life” they were to “con- 
template.” 

All we can say of these opening topics of 
the chapter is that, whatever the occasions were, 
the words occasioned are for us inestimably 
precious. Dear to the heart of the believing 
Church for ages have been these precepts to love 
the brethren (dAadeddia), to love the stranger 
(pirogevia), to remember Abraham at Mamre 
and Gideon at Ophrah with their angel-guests, 
and to see a possible angel-visitor in every 
needing stranger at the door. The call (ver. 2) 
to remember the captive, and the sufferer of 
every sort, comes with solemn power from this 
paragraph, as it presses home the law of 
sympathetic fellowship, and in one _ passing 
phrase (“as being in the body”) reminds us that, 
for the Christian, all sufferings, all burthens of 
pain and care, cease for ever when once he is 
“out of the body.” Sacred is the witness borne 
here to the pure dignity of wedlock (ver. 4): 


102 APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS 


“ Be * marriage honourable in all things, and the 
bed unspotted ; for fornicators and adulterers ”— 
not only adulterers, but those also who sin that 
other sin which the world so easily and so 
blindly condones—‘* God will judge.” And when 
the Christian is warned (ver. 5) against the 
greed of gain, the quoted words of the Old 
Testament make, by the use they are put to, a 
possession for ever valuable to the believing reader 
of the Scriptures. For not only are they in 
themselves wonderful in their emphasis: “I will 
never give thee up; I will never, never desert 
thee.” They are inestimable as an example of 
the sort of use which this New Testament pro- 
phet could make of the spiritual riches of the 
Old Testament. For here he sees a Divine 
watchword for the new life, not only in the 
glorious outburst of faith (ver. 6) in Psalm exviii., 
the Hallel of the Passover. In the words 
spoken to Joshua, and to all appearance spoken 
to him personally and alone (ver. 5: see Josh. 
i. 5), we are led equally to see a message from 
the heart of God straight to every Christian soul. 
Seldom, if ever, are we more powerfully and 
tenderly encouraged than we are here to use 
with confidence that old-fashioned and now often 


* The sentence demands an understood imperative verb, with- 
out which the ‘‘for” which (in the true reading) introduces 
the second clause is out of place. 


DEPARTED GUIDES 103 


disparaged sort of Bible study, the collection 
of eternal and universal principles of spiritual 
life out of an “isolated text.” 

Then comes the passage where the departed 
“ouides” are commemorated. Whoever they 
were, were they a Stephen and a James, or 
saints utterly unknown to us, that passage is 
precious in its principles, true for all time, of 
remembrance and appeal. It consecrates the 
fidelity of the Christian memory. It assures us 
that to cherish the names, the words, the con- 
duct, the holy lives, the blessed deaths, of our 
teachers of days long done is no mere indulgence 
of unfruitful sentiment. It is natural to the 
Gospel, which, just because it is the message 
of an unspeakably happy future, also sanctifies 
the past which is the living antecedent to it. 
Just because we look with the love of hope towards 
“our gathering together unto Him,” we are to 
turn with the love of memory towards all the 
gifts of God given to us through the holy ones 
with whom we look to be “gathered together.” 
“The exit of their walk of life” (ver. 7) is to 
be our study, our meditation. We are to “look 
it up and down” (dvafewpodvtes) as we would 
some great monument of victory, and from that 
contemplation we are to go back into life, to 
“imitate their faith,” to do just what they did, 
treating (xi. 1) the unseen as visible, the hoped- 


104 APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS 


for as present and within our embrace. Thank 
God for this authorization and hallowing of our 
recollections. Precious indeed is its assurance that 
the sweetness of them (for all its ineffable element 
of sadness, as eyes and ears are hungry for the 
faces and the voices gone, for the look and tone 
of the preacher, the teacher, through whom we 
first knew the Lord, or knew Him better) is no 
half-forbidden luxury of the soul but a means 
of victorious grace. 

But now comes in a passage of the chapter 
which more obviously tells its own story of 
occasion and aim. The Writer recurs to the 
supreme theme of the Epistle, the antithesis 
between the Lord Jesus, with His finished work 
and absolute permanence, and the transitory 
antecedents of the older dispensation. Once 
more the Hebrews are to remember His eternity, 
His eternal personal identity, unbeginning and 
without end (ver. 8); He is “the same, yester- 
day, and to-day, and unto the ages.” Before 
all types and preparations, before law, and ritual, 
and prophecy, He is. When, having done their 
long work, they cease, He still is. Over the 
glory of His being and character passes no 
“shadow of turning.” Never to the endless 
ages shall He need to be other than He is, 
or to be succeeded by a greater. “JESUS, 
MessiaH”; He is Alpha; He is also Omega. 


ALPHA AND OMEGA 105 


The whole alphabet of revelation between the 
first letter and the last does but spell out the 
golden legend of His unalterable glory. 

In contrast to Him, thus unchangeably Him- 
self, place the “teachings variegated and alien” 
(ver. 9) which would draw you from beside Him 
(mapagépecOe) back to an outworn ceremonial 
distorted from its true purpose. “Looking unto 
Jesus,” stay still and be at restin Him. The ritual 
law of “food” (Sp@uata) had its perfectly be- 
fitting place in the age of elementary preparation. 
But to make it now a rival to the message of 
that “grace” which means a life lived by faith 
in the Son of God, is to defraud “the heart” of 
that which alone can “establish” it in peace, 
holiness, and hope. To walk in Him is to go 
from strength to strength, To “walk in 
them” (oi wepetatovytes) is to miss the very 
“benefit” you seek. It is to move away from 
the light, backward, into spiritual death. 

Here follows in close sequence a passage of 
pregnant significance. It begins with ver. 10, 
and the connexion is not finally broken till 
ver. 16. The Writer, prompted perhaps by 
the allusion to a ceremonial law of “meats,” 
turns abruptly to the still existing ritual of 
the Law, familiar to his Hebrew readers as to 
himself. From it he leads their thoughts once 
more to the profound import and ultimate 


106 APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS 


efficacy of the supreme atoning Sacrifice, in all 
its shame and all its glory, and to the call which 
that great fact conveys to the believer to break 
for ever, at whatever cost, from the old order, 
considered as a rival to the Cross. Such is the 
true bearing of this often debated passage, if 
I am not greatly mistaken. The “altar” 
which “we have” (ver. 10) is not, if I read 
the argunientative context rightly, either the 
atoning Cross, at least as to any direct reference 
of the word, or the Table of the Christian 
Eucharist. As to this latter conjecture indeed 
the reference is totally unsupported by any 
really primeval parallel And in this Epistle 
it is scarcely conceivable that, if that were the 
meaning, if we were to be abruptly informed 
here that we Christians have in the Holy Table 
a sacrificial altar, no allusion, however slight, 
should intimate that the Christian minister is 
not a “leader” only but a sacrificing priest. 
The whole Epistle may be said to circle round 
the great topic of Priesthood. From various 
points of view, and with purposes as practical 
as possible in regard of faith, hope, and life, 
that topic has been handled. But is it too 


* Lightfoot (on Ign. ad Eph. v., et alibi) has clearly shewn 
that Ignatius’ use of @vc.acrjpiov is altogether mystical. 
He means not the Holy Table but (among other references) 
the Church of Christ as the sphere or place of spiritual 
sacrifice. 


pat ee, 


WE HAVE AN ALTAR 107 


much to say that, for the Writer, the one 
Christian priesthood which is analogous to the 
Levitical priesthood, as a sacrificial and media- 
torial function on behalf of the Church, is the 
High Priesthood of the Son of God? The 
Christian Ministry indeed hardly, if at all, 
comes into view throughout the argument. We 
find it at length in this chapter, the chapter 
which tells the readers that they “have an 
altar.” Twice over the pastors of the Church 
are mentioned here (verses 7, 17); but how? 
As “leaders,” “guides,”  yovmevor: as those 
who “speak the word of God,” as those whose 
vigilance over the souls of the flock claims a 
loving and grateful loyalty. That is to say, 
the Christian Ministry is above all things a 
pastorate. To a sacerdotal aspect of its special 
functions no reference appears. And that is 
noteworthy just because of the profound sacer- 
dotalism of the whole context of the Epistle. 

On a careful review of the words before us 
(verses 10—16), we are justified in the conclu- 
sion that the reference is, not to a Christian 
institution at all but precisely to the Hebrew 
ritual, in which Writer and readers still had part 
as members of the nation. The thing in view is 
an altar whose law was such that the sacerdotal 
“ministers (of Natpevovtes) of the Tabernacle” 
might not use its sacrifices for food. But why ? 





108 APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS 


Not of course because they were not Christians, 
but because the sacrifices in question presented 
there were to be wholly “burned,” “burned without 
the camp.” The entire thought moves within 
the limits of the typical ceremonial. It deals 
with the holocaust which even the sacrificer 
might handle only to commit it to the fire; 
the victim whose destiny was to be—not eaten 
by the priestly family but carried outside the 
camp as wholly devoted for the people’s sins. 

It is possible, within the lines of the Levitical 
ritual, to interpret in more ways than one the 
“altar” in question. It may be the great altar, 
regarded in its special use on the Atonement — 
Day (Lev. xvi); not another structure than 
that used for other sacrifices, but that same 
altar regarded, for the moment, as if separated 
and alone, because of the awful speciality of the 
stern while merciful ritual of that great day. 
Or again, as it has been argued with learning 
and force,* the reference may be to the altar of 
incense, the golden altar of the Holiest, on which 
the blood not only of the atonement victims but 
of all sin-offerings was sprinkled; and every 
sacrifice so treated was regarded as a holocaust ; 
no part of it was reserved for food. But in 
either case the altar in question is not of the 


* By the Rev. James Burkitt, in The Golden Altar: an Ez- 
position of Hebrews xiii. 10, 11. 


WITHOUT THE CAMP 109 


Church but of the Tabernacle. The “we” of 
ver. 10 is the community in its Hebrew rather 
than in its Christian character. 

So the whole thought centres itself in the 
supreme Sacrifice, as Antitype answering to type. 
Jesus is our holocaust, wholly sacrificed for our 
sins. His sacrifice involved in its awful ritual 
the shame and agony of rejection by His own, 
excommunication from “the camp ” of. the chosen. 
Then let the Hebrew believer, “receiving that 
inestimable benefit,” be ready also to follow his 
Redeemer’s steps in rejection and in shame. Let 
him also be prepared for casting out by priest 
and scribe. Let his yearning heart, with what- 
ever anguish, inure itself to the thought that 
the beloved “city of his solemnities” is not the 
final and enduring Jerusalem. Let his “ thoughts 
to heaven the steadier rise,’ as he looks, like 
Abraham before him, to “God’s great town in 
the unknown land,’ where sits on high the 
Mediator of the New Covenant, the “ Priest 
upon His throne.” 


CHAPTER XIII 


LAST WORDS 


Hes, xiii, 15-25 


HE connexion of ver. 15 with the antecedent 
context is suggestive. We have been led 

to a contemplation of the Lord Jesus in His 
character as Antitype and Fulfilment of the 
holocaust of the Levitical atonement. Even as 
the chief animal victim of the old covenant, 
the symbolical bearer of the sins of Israel, was 
carried “outside the camp” to be consumed, so 
our Victim was led “outside the gate” of the city 
to His death, that there, by His blood-shedding, 
by His absolute and perfect self-immolation in 
our stead, He might “ hallow His people,” bringing 
them forgiven and welcomed back to God. The 
point of the dread ritual of Calvary here specially 
emphasized is just this, that He “suffered outside 
the gate.” The old Israel, guiltily unknowing, 
fulfilled the type in the Antitype by refusing 
Him place even to die within the sacred city. 
He, in His love for the new Israel, that He 


110 


GO FORTH UNTO HIM III 


might in every particular be and do what was 
foreshadowed for Him, refused not to submit to 
that supreme rejection. 

From this the apostolic Writer draws two 
messages for his readers. First (ver. 13) they 
are to follow the Lord outside, willing to be 
rejected like Him and because of Him. They 
are to be patient, for His sake, when they are 
“put out of the synagogues” and reproached 
as traitors to Moses. They are by faith to 
conquer the cry of their human hearts as they 
crave perpetuity for the beloved past; they are 
to remember (ver. 14), as they issue from the 
old covenant’s gate into what seems the wild, 
that “Jerusalem that now is” was built for time 
only, and that they belong to the city of eternity, 
where their High Priest sits on His throne to 
bless them now and welcome them hereafter. 
Then, secondly and therefore (ver. 15), they 
are to use Him now and for ever as their one 
sacerdotal Mediator. By Him, not by the 
Aaronic ministry, they are to bring their sacri- 
fices to God. They are to accept exclusion 
and to turn it into inclusion, into a shutting-up 
of all their hopes and all their worship into 
their glorious Christ. And what now is their 
altar-ritual to be? It is to be twofold; the 
offering of praise, “the fruit of lips that confess” 
the glory of “ His Name,” and then the sacrifice 


112 LAST WORDS 


of self and its possessions for others for His sake 
(ver. 16); “doing good, and communicating” 
blessings; for these are “altar-sacrifices (@vciav) 
with which God is well pleased.” 

Such, if we are right, is the connexion. The 
Lord, rejected, that He might die for us after a 
manner faithful to the prophetic type, is to be 
the Hebrew disciple’s example of patience when 
he too is rejected. Such rejection is only to 
unite him the more closely to the Christ as 
his way to God, his Mediator for all the praise 
and all the unselfish service which is to fill 
his dedicated life. 

The lesson was special for the believing 
Hebrew then. But it has its meaning for all 
time. In one way or another the true follower 
of the crucified and rejected Redeemer must 
stand ready for cross and for exclusion, so far 
as he is called upon by his faith to break with 
all ultimate and absolute allegiance save to 
“Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” He has to 
recollect, on one account or another, that he 
too belongs to the invisible order, to the “citi- 
zenship that is in heaven,” and not to any visible 
polity as if it were final, as if it were his spirit’s 
goal. But then he too is to make this detach- 
ment and separation only a fresh means to unite 
him to his great High Priest for a self-sacrificial 
lifein Him. He is to be no frowning sectary, 


THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 113 


saying, “I am holier than thou.” He is to be 
simply a Christian, to whom, whatever the world 
may say, or the world-element in the Church, 
Christ the crucified is Lord indeed. 

Following these appeals, in a connexion which 
we can trace, the thought passes (ver. 17) to the 
Christian Ministry. “Outside the gate” of the 
old order, the disciple finds himself at once not 
an isolated unit but included in a new order. Heis 
one of a spiritual community, which has of course 
its system, for it has to cohere and to operate. 
It has amidst it its “leaders,” its 7yovpevor, its 
pastoral guides and watchmen, a recognized 
institution, which always as such (though always 
the more as it is more true to its ideal) claims 
the obedience, the loyalty, the subordination, of 
the multitude who are not “leaders.” These 
“leaders” are set before us as bearing a Divine 
commission, for we read that they “must give 
account.” So qualified, not as assertors of them- 
selves but as servants and agents of God, they 
watch for souls, with a vigilance loving and 
tender, asking for response. 

Such an ideal of the Christian Ministry is as 
remote as possible from that of a sacerdotal caste, 
or indeed of anything that has to do with a harsh 
and perfunctory officialism. Its position is totally 
different from that of an agency of mediation 
between man and God, between the Church and 

8 


114 LAST WORDS 


her Lord. We have one passing note of this in 
the fact, present in other Epistles as in this, that 
the Ministry is addressed and greeted through 
the Church rather than the Church through the 
Ministry. See below, ver. 24: “Salute your 
leaders.” If we may put it so, the Christian 
clergy are so far from being the sole deliverers of 
the apostolic writings to the people that the people 
rather have to deliver such messages to the clergy. 

Yet on the other hand this passage is one of 
the many which set the Christian Ministry before 
us as a vital factor in the life of the Church, an 
institution which has its life from above, not 
from the will of the community but from the 
gift of God. In their anxiety to avoid distor- 
tions and exaggerations of the ministerial idea 
many Christians have failed to give adequate 
place in thought to its essentially Divine origin 
and commission, A passage like this should - 
correct such a reaction. There is in the Church, 
by the will of God, a “leadership,” recognizable, 
authentic, not arbitrary yet authoritative, not 
mediatorial yet pastoral. It is never designed 
indeed to come really between the believing soul 
and the ever-present Lord. Yet it is appointed 
as the normal human agency by which He works 
for the soul, not only in the solemn ministra- 
tion of His great ordinances of blessing but in 
spiritual assistance and guidance as well. It 


PASTORAL AUTHORITY 115 


will be the pastor’s folly if he so insists upon 
the imagery of shepherding as to forget for one 
moment that the “sheep” are also, and in a 
larger aspect, his equal brethren and _ sisters, 
“the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty.” 
It will be his folly, and the ruin of his true 
authority, if he forgets in any part of his service 
that he is not the master but the servant of the 
Church. If in his “guidance” he dares to 
domineer, and if in his teaching he takes the 
tone of one who can dictate any point of faith 
or duty, on his own authority, apart from the 
Word of God, he is fatally mistaking his whole 
function. Nevertheless he is called to be a 
“leader,” with the responsibilities and duties 
of a leader. This thought is to keep him always 
humble, and always intently on the watch 
over his own life. But it is to be present 
also to the members of the Church, to remind 
them always to tend towards that generous 
“obedience” with which Christian freedom safe- 
guards Christian order. The Church is never to 
forget the responsibility of the Ministry ; it is to 
assist the Ministry in its true discharge. For in 
this also “ we are members one of another.” 


The closing sentences of the great Letter 
(ver. 18 and onwards) call for little detailed 
explanation, with one great exception. The 


116 LAST WORDS 


Writer asks for intercessory prayer for himself 
and his colleagues, in the accent of one who 
knows his own unreserved desire (ver. 18) to 
keep his whole “life-walk honourable,” xad@s 
avactpépecGar. He asks specially for this help, 
with a view to his own speedier return to his 
disciples (ver. 19), an allusion which we cannot 
now explain for certain. At the very end 
(verses 22—25), with a noble modesty, in the 
tone of the true Christian leader, drawing, not 
driving, he asks for “ patience” over his “ appeal ” 
(7apdxXnous), his solemn call for loyalty to the 
Christ of God under all the trials of the time. 
He has “used brevity” (da Bpayéwov) in 
writing ; he might have expanded the vast theme 
iudateaioly ; he has only given them its essen- 
tials. Then he makes his one personal refer- 
ence, abruptly, as if speaking about well-known 
circumstances; Timotheus (ver. 23) has been 
released from prison, and is on his way to join 
the Writer, and the two may hope to visit the 
Hebrews together again. Then follows the 
greeting to the pastors through the Church; and 
then a message of love sent by “ those from Italy,” 
that is to say, as the familiar idiom suggests, 
brethren resident in Italy who send their 
greeting from it; an allusion over which endless 
conjectures may gather but which must always 
remain uncertain. The last word is the blessing 


BENEDICTION 117 


of grace. “Grace”—the holy effect upon the 
Church, and upon the saint, of “God for us” 
and “God in us ”—“ be with you all.” 


We have thus followed this final passage to 
its end, but making, as the reader will have 
seen, ‘one great omission. The twentieth and 
twenty-first verses stand by themselves, with 
such an elevation of their own, with such a 
tranquil majesty of diction, with such a pregnant 
depth of import, that I could not but reserve 
my brief comment on them to the very last in 
these attempts to carry “Messages from the 
Epistle to the Hebrews.” ; 

“Now the God of peace, who hath brought 
again from the dead the Shepherd of the sheep, 
that great Shepherd, with blood of covenant 
eternal, even our Lord Jesus—may He perfect 
you in all good unto the doing of His will, doing 
in you that which is acceptable before Him, by 
means of Jesus Christ; to whom be the glory 
to the ages of the ages. Amen.” 

Here is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, 
of the benedictory prayers of the Bible. At 
every turn it sets before us truths of the first 
order, woven into one wonderful texture. It 
presents to us our God as “the God of peace,” 
the God who has welcomed us to reconciliation 
and is now and for ever reconciled; at peace 


118 LAST WORDS 


with us and we with Him. It sets full in view 
the supreme fact upon which that certainty 
reposes, the Resurrection of His Christ, recorded 
here and only here in the long Epistle, as the 
act and deed by which the Father sealed before 
the universe His acceptance of the Son for us. 
It connects that Resurrection with its mighty 
antecedent, the atoning Death, in words preg- 
nant with the truths characteristic of the Epistle ; 
the Lord, the great Shepherd, was “brought 
again from the dead” (the phrase is reminiscent 
of Isa. lxiii. 11, with its memories of Moses 
and the ascent of Israel from the parted waters), 
“in the blood” (as it were attended, authen- 
ticated, entitled, by the blood) “of covenant 
eternal,” that supreme Compact of Divine love of 
which twice over (chapters viii., x.) the Epistle 
has spoken ; under which, for the slain Mediator’s 
sake, God both forgives iniquity and transfigures 
the will of the forgiven. Then the prayer 
follows upon these mighty premisses. The 
Teacher asks, with the authority of an inspired 
benediction, that this God of peace, of covenant, 
of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus, would 
carry out the covenant-promise in His new Israel 
to the full. May He “perfect” them, that is 
to say, equip them on every side with every 
requisite of grace, for the supreme purpose of 
their existence, the doing of His will in everything. 


THE SHEPHERD OF THE SHEEP 119 


May He so inhabit and inform them, through 
His. Son, by His Spirit, that He shall be the 
will within their will, the force beneath their 
weakness, “working in them to will and to do 
for His good pleasure’s sake” (Phil. ii. 13). To 
Him, the Father, be glory for ever. To Him, 
the Son, be glory for ever. Who shall decide, 
and who need decide, to wvhich Divine Person 
the relative pronoun « precisely: attaches ? 
The glory is to the Fatier in the Son, to the 
Son in the Father. 

One closing word remains. Observe this 
designation just here a»plied to the Lord Jesus 
Christ; “the Shepherd, the great Shepherd, of 
the sheep.” It is noteworthy, because in our 
Epistle it stands here quite alone. We have 
had the Christ of God presented to us through- 
out under the totally different character of the 
High Priest, the great Self-Immolator of the 
Cross, now exalted in the glory of His High 
Priesthood to be the Giver of blessing from the 
Throne. To Him in that sublime aspect the 
thought of the Hebrew believer, so sorely tempted 
to look away from Him, to look backward to 
the old and ended order, has been steadily 
directed, for spiritual rest of conscience and for 
loyalty of will. But here, true to that habit 
of the Bible, if the word may be used, with 
which it accumulates on Him the most diverse 


. See 


120 LAST WORDS 


titles in the effort to set forth His fulness, the 
Writer exchanges all this range of thought for 
the one endearing designation of the SHEPHERD 
of the sheep. Tt was as such that He went 
down to death, giving for the flock His life. It 
was as such that He is “brought again,” to 
rescue, to watch, to feed, to guide His beloved 
charge, “in the powe- of life indissoluble.” 

Not without purpose, surely was the Lord left 
pictured thus in the view of His tried and 
tempted followers. In the region of conviction 
and contemplation He was to shine always 
before them as the High riest upon His throne, 
the more than fulfilment of every type and 
shadow, the goal of Prophecy, “the end of the 
Law.” But He was to be all this as being also, 
close beside them, their Shepherd, great and 
good. He was to be with them in the pasture, 
and in the desert, and in the valley of the shadow 
of death. They had followed Him indeed as 
their Sacrifice without the gate. But precisely 
there He took to Himself His resurrection-life, 
to be their Companion and their Watcher for 
evermore. The Lord was their Shepherd, and 
He is ours; they should not, and we shall not, 
want. 





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